As variation analysis has developed over the decades, there has been increasing interest in narrowing in from large-scale investigations of broad patterns of variation across speaker groups to investigating variation within the speech of individual speakers, as well as how individual variation coheres into personal and group speech styles and how variation unfolds in intra-individual discourse. This increasing focus on the individual stems from the recognition that patterns of language variation are not simply reflections of social meanings and group memberships. Rather, they are co-constitutive with individual, interactional, and social meanings, social categories, societal and cultural forces, and ways of thinking (i.e. attitudes, ideologies). In this, variation analysis aligns itself with the social scientific turn toward social constructionism, which holds that group behaviors and societal institutions are constituted, re-constituted, changed, and sometimes even subverted in the everyday, ongoing actions and interactions of individuals. At the same time, social constructionist views maintain that individuals do not exist in a vacuum. Their actions and interactions in turn are shaped by the individuals with whom they interact, by the groups they identify with and disassociate from, and by wide-scale and often quite enduring ideologies about social interaction, social groups, and social forces (e.g. the maintenance of a dichotomous male–female gender division).

Because individual linguistic usages and individual creativity are today seen as so important, the study of stylistic variation has now become central not only in discussions of intra-speaker variation per se but variation analysis more generally, since many researchers now hold that even established group and situational styles (dialects, registers) have their roots in individual agentive linguistic usages and that changes in individual and group styles are grounded in people’s use of stylistic resources in unfolding linguistic interaction (Coupland 2007, Eckert 2005).