In conference interpreting research, empirical investigation can be classified as observational or experimental. The former can be used for exploration, analysis and hypothesis-testing, and is either interactive or non-interactive. Besides its conventional role of hypothesis-testing, the latter can be exploratory. The main methodological problems in both are related to validity and representativeness and to quantification. At this stage, the most important contribution to interpreting research can be expected from observational procedures. Simple descriptive statistics and uncomplicated quantitative processing of the data still have much to offer.
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Daniel Gile (1998) studied this question.