Flexible Components of Situated Talk (Edwards)

I have been working on the readings for my mini-lit review and I came across a quote/idea that I am hoping that you can help me understand.  I think that I have it, but I am not sure.

‘Language as action’ (Wittenstein, 1953/1958).  'It is not a matter of proving or disproving the nature or existence of real minds or what children as individuals ‘really’ think or learn, but rather of taking a different perspective on language, which examines verbal conceptualizations as flexible components of situated talk' (Edwards, 1993, p. 209).

I think that I understand the idea of language as action.  We are all doing something with our language even if we are unaware of what it is that we are doing.  You have spoken in class about different things that we do in conversations that help us accomplish different things in our conversations.  You stated that we aren’t being manipulative or anything, but instead we are unknowingly accomplishing something.  For example, one of my classmates (I think Jessica) stated that she never could figure out in DP how you knew when she wanted to speak until she read about breaths role in conversation (looking for an in).  What does Wittenstein or Edwards mean by ‘flexible components of situated talk’?  Is it just simply like the breath example?  Is it those moments that we have in our conversations (next-turn responses, breaths, pauses, etc.) or is it something else?

Am I a Constructivist...

Do you think that I am a constructivist or at least living somewhere close in that area?  Natalia says yes.  I know I am not a Positivist or a Postpositivist.  I think that for me to become either of those I would have to start sleeping a member of the Bush family and have the stamp on my forehead 'scientifically research-based'.  I wish that I was a member of the critical theory camp, especially since I work with a lot of minority students in ESL who are predominately low SES.  I know that I am not a feminist.  According to Guba and Lincoln (1994, 2005), critical theorists have the stance of 'transformative intellectual', which sounds so smart, but they lose me at activist.  I am an advocate for the students in my building, but I am not a world changer.  I also wish or think that I could be participatory.  I would like to do a study in which I was living in a jungle somewhere and became a part of the culture and community that I was studying.  However, my work with ESL Book Clubs as Professional Development involved working with the communities of practice theory and I was a full member of the group. I was participatory there, I think.  Am I creative enough to be participatory?

I believe that in any setting the researcher changes on some level what is being researched.  I think that  even with the best intentions there is change, like what we have been talking about in regards to conversations.  If I say the sky is blue (BASIC no point example really), it could change the course of the conversation and the outcome of participants' views.  I think I am constructivist, because 'co-constructed realities', 'co-created findings', 'vicarious experiences', 'trustworthiness', and 'passionate participant' (2005).

Conversation, Archive, Balance

Rapley, T. (2007).  Doing conversation, discourse and document analysis. London: Sage.

Early on in the reading (73), Rapley has a quote that I really liked that really summed up for me what we have been talking about during DP and DA regarding what the point of ‘talk’ is:  As Moerman (1992) explains it, ‘Talk is a central part of social interaction, and social interaction is the core and enforcer, the arena and teacher, the experienced context of social life’ (1992, p. 29). Natalia and I were talking about the readings for this week as part of our class tonight on theoretical frameworks and Natalia helped me identify with something that we read regarding language.  Language is everything and without it there is nothing.  We can express ourselves we can choose to mislead others through our talk, but, either way, we have still accomplished something with our language.  Without language, how can we accomplish anything?  Discourse analysis can help us determine what it is that is being accomplished through ‘naturally occurring talk’ (74).  ‘This style of analysis—often undertaken by people doing conversation analysis and discursive psychology—focuses on how social actions and practices are accomplished in and through talk and interaction’ (74). ‘It is not hard to see that descriptions are never neutral but produce a specific version or understanding of the world.  So a question to ask is: how are specific identities produced, sustained, or negotiated within texts’ (115)?

A lot of the focus for this session’s readings focused on the different elements that can be observed in participant speech and conversations.  Rapley specifically mentioned things such as the use of preferred response or dispreferred responses (85); structure organizations (80); and repairs and breaches (78).  Another important aspect of this week’s readings consisted of the use of conversations about and with documents.  I was really intrigued by the discussion of docments-in-use.  ‘A focus on documents-in-use also enables a focus on what some researchers have called ‘material culture’ or ‘the social life of objects’.  It can raise your awareness of how ‘things’ are embedded in and intimately transform our actions and interactions (89).’  I thought how fascinating it would be to look at different documents used in schools and the conversations around them.  For examples that I thought about concerned the use of Tiger observation tools for teacher evaluations, parent teacher conference notifications, sign-up sheets for different school meetings and requirements.  You could get so many perspectives and insights into how things are accomplished and felt about in the school by looking at how the documents are used and quoted interactions (92).

Another element/quote that I found interesting in relation to one of your responses on a recent post concerned the use of context.  Rapley stated that we could ‘Think about ways that people provide others with contextual information (laughter, gestures, or words) about how to hear and understand what they are saying’ (82).  In your response to me, you acknowledged my concern with the lack of context that could happen if you acknowledge situations without background or with the use of audio alone.  You pointed out that we have historically communicated just fine through the use of telephones and I started again thinking about my own personal preferences.  One element that may make me focus on the lack of context (body language, etc.) in audio recordings is the fact that I hate talking on the telephone.  The reason that I hate it is simple.  I don’t like not seeing the other person’s face.  I don’t like not being able to see their facial expressions or body language when they are talking to me.  I don’t like not knowing if they are really focused on something else or if they are focused on the conversation at hand.  I don’t like not knowing if I am really interrupting something that they would prefer to be doing.  Its one of the reasons that I love the idea or use of Face Time on the iPhone. 

As I was going through my reading notes, I found it interesting that my comments that I was making as I was reading were most focused on Chapter 8: Exploring Conversations and Discourse:  Some Debates and Dilemmas.  One of the first things I reacted to was ‘As one person noted to me, ‘It feels like people are too obsessed with the detail and just don’t look up from the transcripts, they don’t notice what is really going on in the world’ (98).  I have been having issues with DP and DA, but it wasn’t this.  I think anyone who has even attempted to work through the transcription process once knows that it isn’t obsession with detail that drives the researcher who works with transcripts.  When I think of transcripts (I know it isn’t always the case), I think of qualitative researchers and I think of them as being what Guba and Lincoln refer to as the ‘passionate researcher’.  They are involved.  They are involved with the data and they are involved with every aspect of the research. 

We have read about and discussed the cucumber situation several times, but this reading helped me understand other elements of that interaction, especially in regards to identities.  ‘At certain moments in this encounter, specific identities and related social structures emerge as relevant for the participants at specific moments in the encounter‘ (101).  In my work as a teacher, the teacher voice is often referred to and made fun of in regards to how it comes out. For me, I have had instances when ‘the teacher voice’ that comes out in public when dealing with other people’s children or in talking with friends and family confronted with conflict, such as unruly children or those in my life not doing what I think they should do.  As humans, we have a lot of hats that we wear and it would be interesting to study someone in depth to determine when and how their other identities become relevant. 

Another example from the reading that I felt was especially relevant to educators concerned the different styles of consultation observed in a medical setting and how the ‘ideal’ style was actually the least used and not used for the positive reasons that one would hope. ‘An ‘empowering’ and ‘patient-centered consultation’ – was used to dissuade patients from further medical intervention.  And Silverman (1987) clearly shows—demonstrating one of Michael Foucalt’s famous observations—how power can work as much by encouraging persons to speak, as by silencing them’ (109). From sitting in parent meetings for ESL students, I have seen a lot of examples where the teachers respond to the parents as if they are partners in the child’s education and they open with positive sentiments about the child and the work that is being done/observed this year.  The problem that I have is that ultimately I think that the parents are being silenced with kindness by catching them off guard when the teacher takes the conversation in the direction that it was intended all along.  Does that make sense?  Is that a fair comparison?

One last example from the reading that I thought helpful this time related to the missing descriptor of age in the dating ad.  Rapley wrote that we ‘can take this reading further, if we focus on how the different elements of the text combine to further consolidate (or disrupt) the meaning (113).  He looked at how the other words or sentiments in the ad point to the age of the writer of the ad.  ‘You can see how my analysis is made possible by both reading with and against the grain of the text and focusing on how the different elements work together’ (113).  In education, I think that it would be interesting to look at conversations that pre-service teachers have or veteran teachers have as they are being faced with so many educational reform efforts and look at those in relation to advertisements that are being sent to schools or bulletin boards that administration are putting up.  What themes emerge between the two, etc.?  I think that this idea has derailed somewhat, but what I am trying to say is that frustration is being felt in my building and I know that it would come up in observed ‘naturally occurring talk’.  It would be interesting to look at documents that are being directed toward teachers and the slant the senders put in their advertisements.  (In relation to the missing descriptor of age in the dating ad and made me think that this would be an interesting assignment for future DA students to create their own dating ad before the reading and analyze it in small groups and then again after the reading to discuss things that they chose to include or leave out in their ad creation.)

Two further quotes that I really want to point out were:

·          In and through studying discourse you begin to see how there is not ‘a truth’ but rather multitude and sometimes, contradictory truths or versions. Also, language does not ‘refer to a stable reality’ but produces multiple possible understandings of the real (128). The first is something that Natalia and I were talking about in our small group tonight.  And, I think that it is something that I have been struggling with throughout my time in DP and DA, because of the limited knowledge that I have regarding what it all means.  As I am ‘constructing’ my research identity, I can see how the ‘truth’ is constructed based on a lot different understandings of the situation and discourse.  I thought about a situation that occurred last week when I was taking my son to school.  We stopped at a restaurant in Farragut where there was an intersection.  For individuals coming one way, they had a stop sign with a line on the road indicating where to stop, but the stop sign had been hit and was turned slightly out.  The other lanes of traffic didn’t have stop signs.  If people had wrecked at this intersection because someone failed to stop at the sign, the discourse produced could have been the ‘truth’ based on the individual’s.

·         Your job is to convince others that your claims, your interpretations, are both credible and plausible, that you are not just making this up from thin air or this is just your vague hunch, but that your argument is based on the materials from your archive (128).This could also be tied to the intersection example.  Just as it is the driver’s responsibility to ‘prove’ their version of the accident or accounting of the situation, it is our responsibility as researchers to prove that we aren’t going on a hunch, but are instead going on the data.  We can use the discourse itself to help prove our analysis (such as using next-turn responses) or we can use are data archive to back up what we are saying as researchers.  Is this correct?  Am I starting to get it?

Additional Reading Notes

Chapter 6: Exploring Conversations

Through the answer ‘I don’t remember’ she avoids confirming the question and so avoids both confirming and disconfirming information that could be potentially damaging or discrediting to her case (73).

Look with wonder at some of the taken-for-granted—seen but unnoticed—ways that we do social life.  The aim is to describe the richly layered practices of social life through a close and detailed observation of people’s action and interaction.  The central sources of these observations are recordings of ‘naturally occurring’ talk and interaction (74).

You attempt to build a case that this organized way of talking is something that people do as part of their everyday lives—that this thing is part of how we routinely interact (77).

Turn-taking organizations can craft specific rights and responsibilities.  When turns are not rigidly pre-allocated, say when you are chatting to your friends over a coffee, as you can never be quite sure when it is your turn—when you might be asked to offer an answer to their question, or make an appreciative sound about a holiday photograph they are talking you through—you need to listen, you need to be in that moment.  If you are not there, you can be held accountable and then may have to work to repair that potential breach.  In this way, the turn-taking system provides a powerful way to co-ordinate and display speakers’ understanding of the moment (78).

This style of work never just focuses on single sentences or utterances, but rather focuses on how specific actions—be they turns of talk or gestures—are embedded in, emerge from and are understood within the sequences of ongoing actions.  Our actions are both shaped by prior actions and shape what follows them (78). 

To get a sense of how turns are designed you should focus on the action the talk is designed to perform and the means selected to perform that action (Drew and Heritage, 1992). (79)

Another feature that analysts focus on is just what words people use as they talk (79).

The organization of ‘structure’ refers to just how the broader trajectory of the talk is organized.  Following structure of sequences (of a phone call with friends): Opening, Reason for Call, Discussion of the Topic, New Topic Emerges, Discussion of New Topic, and Close (80)

  

By just thinking about how some of the above features of talk work in relation to your own experiences and recordings, you can become more sensitive to just how that specific interaction ‘comes off’ (81).

With a refusal or disagreement you routinely get some combination of the following actions:

·      Delays: a gap before a response or a gap within a response, a delay before an answer is given

·      Hesitations: like ‘mm’ ‘erm’ ‘uhm’ and in-breath or out-breath

·      Prefaces: like ‘Well’ and ‘Uh’, agreement tokens like ‘Yeah’

·      Mitigations: apologies and appreciations

·      Accounts: excuses, explanations, justifications and reasons (84)

This is not to say that we all behave like robots and that is the only way that people do this work, but rather, when doing socially we routinely work with and against this specific normative interaction order (84).

Preferred actions that are direct and plain responses and dispreferred actions that are delayed and embellished responses document what conversation analysis call preference organization (85).

What we can take away from these types of investigations is that talk is not just a ‘trivial’ medium for social life, but rather it is in and through our talk and interactions that we experience, produce and maintain social life (86).

Chapter 7:  Exploring Conversations About and with Documents

We never just somehow neutrally or abstractly engage with documents, they are always engaged with in a specific local context; as such, they are always read or used in a specific way, to do specific work (88).

A focus on documents-in-use also enables a focus on what some researchers have called ‘material culture’ or ‘the social life of objects’.  It can raise your awareness of how ‘things’ are embedded in and intimately transform our actions and interactions (89).

Documents and related technologies both constrain and enable our actions and interactions (89).

Another way to think about documents-in-use is to focus on how documents get referred to and quoted from in an interaction (92).

One of the things that Goodwin’s analysis highlights is how texts do not speak for themselves but rather that they are always spoken for (95).

The focus is on how institutions are produced in and through the collaborative actions and interactions of people and things.  So what the analysis of conversation allows us to do is to try to document the ways that people and things organize specific institutions and institutional tasks and identities (97).

Only conducting interviews or focus group with participants about what they do or only reading texts that describe what participants do, will only ever offer part of that story and will often miss the quite beautiful, sophisticated and artful ways that we reproduce social life (97).

Chapter 8:  Exploring Conversations and Discourse:  Some Debates and Dilemmas

As one person noted to me, ‘It feels like people are too obsessed with the detail and just don’t look up from the transcripts, they don’t notice what is really going on in the world’ (98).

Others will disagree and argue that I am making far too many assumptions and straying away from only relying on what the participants themselves are doing at just that moment (102).  Other debates include:

·      The hidden role of the analyst’s knowledge when making claims.

·      The focus on very brief extracts of action and interaction.

·      The focus on naturally occurring data and local contexts.

·      The absence of any discussion about power (102).

The ability to hear or see that a particular gesture or action is doing a particular word depends, in part, on your ability to recognize just why they were doing what they were doing at that point (103).

For me, how I come to understand certain moments of interaction can at some moments depend on my ability, as a culturally competent member of a specific community (103).

Acknowledging the role of your own knowledge is making sense of what is going on for participants, does not in any way deny that attending to participants’ orientations is the central task of analysis (104). 

You need to gain a certain level of members’ knowledge or, as Lynch (1993) calls it, ‘vulgar competence’, of the language and routines of your research site (104).

A central feature of this types of work is that your key proof for your analytic claims is what participants are actually doing and saying.  So your claim that someone is ‘asking a question’ is actually proved by someone else then ‘giving an answer’, or in some cases when an answer is not given, by the question-asker saying ‘Hey I asked you a question’ or re-asking the question an then getting an answer.  This is sometimes called the ‘next-turn proof procedure’, in that when you are trying to get a sense about what a specific stretch of talk or action is doing, you can look at:

·      Prior-turns

·      Next-turns (104)

Be aware of the temporal and evolving nature of talk, actions and meanings in encounters—and this occurs within a single encounter and over series of encounters (105).

As my favourite maxim puts it: We think in generalities but we live in detail.  As such, a focus on the local context does not ignore the broader themes and concepts, rather it often asks you to think differently about them and so, maybe, you will begin to ask different questions (107).

Chapter 9: Exploring Documents

Exploring a text often depends as much on focusing on what is said—and how a specific argument, idea, or concept is developed—as well as focusing on what is not said—the silences, gaps or omissions (111).

·      A noticeably absent feature of the text

·      Culturally shared knowledge (112)

When studying texts you are also interested in the rhetorical work of the text, how the specific issues it raises are structured and organized and chiefly how it seeks to persuade you about the authority of its understanding of the issue (113).

Some work with texts specifically focuses on how ideas, practices and identities emerge, transform, mutate, and become the relatively stable things we have today.  They seek to understand and describe the (historical) trajectory of the contemporary ideas, practices, and identities we all currently just take for granted (119).

Whether you spend all of your time working with just texts, or they are just part of your archive, the best advice I can offer is to read them and then re-read, and above all engage with them ‘skeptically’ (123).

Chapter 10:  Some Closing Comments

Analysis is always an ongoing process that routinely starts prior to entering your research site, visiting that library or audiotaping that radio programme.  As soon as I become interested in a specific topic, I will start to collect some literature one the topic, both ‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’.  This reading, alongside conversations with experts, past experiences and ‘bizarre bolts from the blue’ (often over a strong coffee), gives me some initial clues as to possible trajectories of the research, some research questions and analytic themes and codes.  These diverse sources of knowledge often become analytic themes that I initially explore in my archive of materials. Other themes, ideas and topics routinely emerge in ad hoc and haphazard ways over the course of the research (126).

It is said that all qualitative researchers now face a ‘double crisis’:

·      A crisis of representation—as the research text can no longer be assumed to ‘capture’ the lived experience or just present ‘the facts’ in the way once thought possible.

·      A crisis of legitimacy—as the old criteria for evaluating the ‘truthfulness’ of accounts of qualitative research can no longer hold (128).

To put is simply, the crisis of legitimacy is concerned with questioning two key ‘positivist’ notions about the quality of research: ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’ (128).

Steps and Key Points of Analyzing Conversations, Discourse, and Documents

1.     Formulate your initial research questions.

2.     Start a research diary.

3.     Find possible sources of material and begin to generate an archive.

4.     Transcribe the texts in some detail.

5.     Skeptically read and interrogate the texts.

6.     Code.

7.     Analyze.

8.     Validity and rigour.

9.     Write up (131). 

The Missing Link...

I think I found my missing link, but I'm not sure.  You are going to roll your eyes and me and think to yourself, 'Oh this poor girl!'  But, I think I found what I have been missing.  I think I finally figured out what I have been struggling with and why I have been having a hard time understanding the point of the stuff that we have been reading in DP and DA.  I told you weeks ago that I hoped that EDPY 640 was going to help me and I think that it finally did. I told you that I didn't understand what the heck people were talking about and I didn't understand how to go about figuring it out.  I mean there are a million different types of theories out there and so many paradigms.  I think that I have been struggling with the research paradigms for the studies that we have been reading.  I am not saying that I disagree with them, but I think I didn't understand where they were coming from.  Are most of the studies that we have been reading Poststructuralist?  "There is not 'Truth' to be known; Researchers examine the world through textual representations of it." (Hatch, Fig. 1.1, Research Paradigms, pg. 13)  Do you think this is the missing link?  I have been thinking of research as searching for 'The Truth' and with the things that we have been reading the researchers aren't searching for 'The Truth'.  They are seeking answers, they are seeking insight, and they are trying to get meaning.  But, they are not seeking one final, ultimate truth, because for them, at least, there is no one truth only what is made relevant.

Conversation Analysis

Conversation analysis (CA) Key Propositions:

·      Talk-in-interaction is systematically organized and deeply ordered.

·      The production of talk-in-interaction is methodic.

·      The analysis of talk-in-interaction should be based on naturally occurring data.

·      Analysis should not initially be constrained by prior theoretical assumptions (20).

Okay, I admit it.  I am one of those people that you have been talking about.  I like to be told what to do and how to do it. I had a bit of a melt down when I read the authors’ words that this wasn’t a book of sequential steps to follow or a how-to book.  I think that is one of the reasons that I liked the Intro to Research courses for earlier degrees. The material was presented, maybe not as a how-to, but as ‘in research you form your questions, you collect your data, you analyze your date, you present your findings…’ The further that I go in learning about qualitative research the scarier that it becomes.  It feels like there isn’t one right way to do it, but there are a lot of wrong ways to do it. When your ultimate process ends with a dissertation and defense and public viewing, this is terrifying to me. I’m type A.  I want to get it wrong.  How do you figure out all of the ambiguity that you come across in this line of research, so that you are answering the questions that you hope to answer in the best way possible? Ambiguity probably isn’t the word that I am looking for, but how do you figure how the best step to take next to ensure that you are answering your research questions, analyzing your data correctly, and presenting your data in the best manner possible? It seems like there are so many issues to address and I only have 8 years to learn it. 

As the authors stated it, ‘At the most basic level, conversation analysis is the study of talk…It is the systematic analysis of the talk produced in everyday situations of human interaction: talk-in-interaction (11).’  Based on the work that we did in DP this summer looking at the talk that people engaged in throughout different conversations, such as the Paula Deen interview and the Zimmerman 911 transcript, I find this line of work very interesting.  Sacks ‘observed that initial actions can be designed to invite a particular kind of response (46).’  This made me think of our work in DP with the Paula Deen interview and the appearance that the interview questions were set up in a manner that appeared to be ‘putting the screws’ to her, but seemed on analysis to be set up to allow her to give a particular response.

I still think that I am missing the big picture though.  If I am looking at the lunchtime conversations of teachers, how does that become research?  How do I structure it as a research project?  Don’t get me wrong.  I see the importance of looking at participants talk and analyzing why they chose the words, phrases, etc., but I am struggling to see how I would could use everyday conversations as research.  But, I am trying. 

I have been watching old reruns of Friends and trying to look at the discourse of the characters and how they are phrasing different things and where they put their intonation, etc.  ‘The implication is that even when speakers are describing the most routine and commonplace events or states of affairs they have a wide range of alternative words and combinations of words from which to choose(33).’ But how do you determine this really in your research?  In CA or DA, are you trying to determine why they chose the combination of words they chose or what their pauses meant?  If you don’t know why, how do you determine what action they are trying to accomplish?  Or are you just concerned with what was accomplished?  For example, after the Rachel and Ross On a Break fiasco, there is this uncomfortable exchange when the friends are confronted with having to choose which friend to hang out with.  Based on their roles in the group and characters on the show, the exchange was deflated by the choices of their words. 

In addition to that, the reasons that the characters on Friends presented in the above mentioned scenario for why they made the choices that they made are very much based on their defined membership categories on the show. For Sacks, ‘These categories are culturally available resources which allow us to describe, identify, or make reference to other people or to ourselves (35).’  ‘Sack’s ideas about membership categorization are sometimes treated as less important or less interesting aspect of his work, or as one which he consciously moved away from in later years (39).’  Since our work this summer, I have been trying to work on my reflexivity and really trying to understand who I am and what I believe about different things that I am considering for my research.  In terms of membership categories, I am a mother, wife, teacher, woman, daughter, grand-daughter, friend, vegetarian, jeep driver, reader, southerner, democrat, etc.  No matter how I am trying to define who I am or for what purpose, I always lead with mother.  I have been thinking about why I do this.  I think that I know the reason(s).  I am the daughter of divorced parents and of a deceased parent.  I was adopted by my grandparents.  I feel like I have to describe or reveal more about myself than I want when I say I am the daughter of… I am also divorced. I feel like people come and go in your life according to the start and stop of different life chapters.  Nothing is permanent.  Based on my relationships with my family and my previous relationship, my number one priority is preserving my relationship with my son and making sure that I don’t foul that up like I feel my mother did.  ‘Categorization and the inferential practices associated with it can in fact be seen as central to the accomplishment of order in many domains of language use and talk-in-interaction (39).’ In my research working with other participants, if I was conducting CA, would I be concerned with why a participant chose to identify themselves by saying ‘I am a mother, wife, and teacher’?  If not, where would my focus be put? If the participant didn’t elaborate or if I was working with text data such as a blog post, what would I do with this information?  How would the concept of membership categories be used?

Another element that was interesting to me based on our previous course work together was the information on adjacency pairs and the issue of conditional relevance that occurs when there is a ‘noticeable absence’ (45).  The example that you gave us previously in the summer was an invitation from a professor to either a colleague or GA to co-participate in a research study.  The preferred response, of course, is yes, but that may not be the response that is gotten.  This also made me think about how this research could be used in other areas.  What about text messages?  If permission was given and text exchanges were analyzed, I am sure that this occurs often even with no intention for it to happen.  I know it is the case with my ex-husband.  We text instead of talk.  If you were to look at our text exchanges, you would find a ton of examples where one of us ask a question and no response is given by the other person or the response given is ‘We’ll see’ or ‘We’ll talk about it’.  The background or shared experience is also very relevant in our messages, where things are mentioned that we both know without any context having to be provided.  There is also of how intonation is portrayed in text messages via emoticons or typing in all caps.  ‘Close monitoring is needed to identify when an appropriate juncture to take a turn occurs; by the same token, failure to take a turn when one is ‘required’ to can be treated as an accountable action (46).’  This, too, I would think shows up a lot in texting.  The thing that I wanted to say or rather ask in relation to this is whether rhetorical questions fall in this area. 

This is a big area where I am struggling with what we have covered so far in both DA and DP.  I know that for me personally body language is an area that I think is really important for understanding what is occurring in conversations. ‘CA’s explicit focus on the organization of talk-in-interaction means that gesture, body movement and facial expression are not studied in their own right…but rather in exploring the relationships between speech and body movement (70).’ In regards to my earlier question about CA’s possible role in looking at the discourse of teacher lunchtime conversations, if you were to analyze a lunch time conversation in which my translator was a participant and you didn’t analyze body language, there would never be an accurate analysis of what she was saying, how she said it, or what she accomplished by what she said.  She consistently talks with a positive sounding voice with what seems like an approving attitude toward something, but in reality she is rolling her eyes or pretending to flip a bird.  If you didn’t analyze her body language, you would never know her meaning. But the second part of this statement, ‘rather in exploring the relationships between speech and body movement (70),‘ seems to imply that there is analysis of body language in relationship to speech. Can you explain this relationship to me? I am struggling… 

The last reading for this week in relation to the book focused on transcription and the importance of the transcript in helping work with the talk.  Some key points that I took away from this section were:

·      ‘the aim in CA is not simply to transcribe the talk and then discard the tape in favour of the transcript’ (70)

·      wherever possible, then transcript is used in conjunction with the tape during analysis’ (70)

·      ‘the analyst/transcriber’s hearing of what is on the tape.  And of course, that hearing may alter.  Repeated listening to tapes almost always throws up phenomena which are simply missed first time around’ (86)

·      ‘transcripts are central to guaranteeing the cumulative verifiable nature of conversation analytic research’ (87)

Another element from this reading that I found important concerned the three basic facts about conversation: 

1.     turn-taking occurs,

2.     one speaker tends to talk at a time, and

3.     turns are taken with as little gap or overlap between them as possible (49)

An audio-taped conversation taken from my house would provide a perfect example of problems that occur when there is breakdown concerning these facts about conversation.  My son and I tend to talk fast, leave out details, etc. because of our shared history.  My husband tends to talk slower and utilize a huge amount of wait time.  The breakdown occurs, because my son and I think that my husband is finished talking and we insert dialogue when he isn’t finished.  My husband thinks that we don’t care or that we are interrupting, but we think that he is finished.  There would be a lot of analysis to do there in terms of transcription conventions, such as ‘gaps and pauses’ (73-80).

Reading Notes

Hutchby, I. & Wooffitt, R. (2008) Conversation analysis.

Talk is a central activity in social life; but how is ordinary talk organized, how do people coordinate their talk in interaction, and what is the role of talk in wider social processes? Conversation analysis (CA) aims to address these questions (1).

Conversation analysis is characterized by the view that how talk is produced, and how the meanings of talk are determined, are the practical, social and interactional accomplishments of members of a culture (1).

CA father Harvey Sacks between 1964 and 1972 (2)

CA’s distinctive contribution is to show that analytic access can be gained to the situated achievement of intersubjectivity by focusing on the sequential organization of talk: in other words, on the management of turn-taking (4).

‘Structure’ is a feature of situated social interaction that participants actively orient to as relevant for the ways they design their actions (4).

CA is relevant for 3 main reasons:

1.     the ethnography of communication;

2.     pragmatics;

3.     discourse analysis (4)

Discursive psychologists have been critical of the ways in which the discipline of psychology has tended to treat language as a passive or neutral means of communication (5).

CA assumption:  ordinary talk is highly organized, socially ordered phenomenon (11)

At the most basic level, conversation analysis is the study of talk.  It is the systematic analysis of the talk produced in everyday situations of human interaction: talk-in-interaction (11).

CA: research based on transcribed tape-recordings of actual interactions; naturally occurring talk (12)

CA differs from Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962) bc it argued that all utterances performed actions, rather than simply describing the world in ways that were either true or false (18)

A commonsense assumption is that conversation itself is a mundane, local event that is more random than ordered.  The findings of conversation analysis represent a persistent challenge to that assumption (19-20). 

Sequential order of talk: taking turns at talking; they are describable ways in which turns are linked together into definite sequences (41)

·      next turn: place where speakers display their understanding of the prior turn’s possible completion (41)

Inferential order: kinds of cultural and interpretive resources participants rely on in order to understand one another in appropriate ways (42)

·      sequential order and inferential order described as same side of the same coin (42)

Temporal order: talk is produced in time, in a series of ‘turn constructional units’ out of which turns themselves are constructed (complaints, requests, offers, warnings, etc.) (42)

Adjacency Pairs: classes of utterances conventionally come in pairs (question and answers, greetings and return-greetings, invitation and acceptances/declines, etc.); ideally, the two parts should be produced next to each other, but systematic insertions can legitimately come between first and second pair parts (42-43)

Preference Adjacency Pairs:  certain first parts make alternative actions relevant in second position where basically there is a preferred action and a ‘dispreferred’ action-offers which are accepted or refused; assessments which are agreed with or disagreed with; and, requests which can be granted or denied (46)

‘dispreference markers’ one of the most significant ways speakers have of indicating the dispreferred status of a turn is by starting the turn with markers such as “well” or ‘um” (47).

preferred actions are characteristically performed straightforwardly and without delay, while dispreferred actions are delayed, qualified and accounted for (47).

3 Basic Facts About Conversation: 

4.     turn-taking occurs,

5.     one speaker tends to talk at a time, and

6.     turns are taken with as little gap or overlap between them as possible (49)

Jefferson (1986) 3 Major Categories of Overlap Onset:

1.     traditional onset (when a speaker orients to a possible transition-relevance place)

2.     recognitional onset (when the next speaker feels they recognize what current speaker is saying and can project its completion, even if that is before the end of a turn-construction unit), and

3.     progressional onset (when there is some disfluency in the current turn and a next speaker suggests a completion in order to move the conversation forward) (56)

Repair: Jefferson and Sacks (1977) point out, not all conversational repair actually involves any factual error on the speaker’s part (57)

Four Varieties of Repair Sequences:

1.     self-initiated self-repair: Repair is both self-initiated and carried out by the speaker of the trouble source.

2.     other-initiated self-repair: Repair is carried out by speaker of the trouble source but initiated by the recipient.

3.     Self –initiated other-repair: The speaker of the trouble source may try and get the recipient to repair the trouble-for instance if a name is proving troublesome to remember.

4.     Other-initiated other-repair: The recipient of a trouble-source turn both initiates and carries out the repair.  This is the closest to what is conventionally understood as ‘correction’. (60)

Conversation analysis places a great deal of emphasis on the use of extracts from transcriptions of tape-recorded, naturally occurring interactions in its research (70).

For CA, transcripts are not thought of as ‘data’.  The data consist of tape-recordings of naturally occurring interactions.  These may be audio or video tapes (70).

Two particular aspects of speech delivery that are of great importance for doing conversation analytic work are: a) when spoken syllables are stretched; and b) basic features of intonation (72). Transcription Conventions:

·      turn-taking and overlap

·      gaps and pauses

·      breathiness (73-80)

Wiggins, S., Potter, J. & Wildsmith, A. (2001).  Eating your words: Discursive psychology and the reconstruction of eating practices. 

-eating practices in a more naturalistic environment, using mealtime conversations tape-recorded by families at home (5)

-3 issues: 1) how the nature and evaluation of food are negotiable qualities; 2) the use of participants’ physiological states as rhetorical devices; and 3) the variable construction of norms of eating practices (5)

-broad overview of main topics of eating research: consumption behaviour, attitudes and taste preferences, links between eating and body image (6)

-3 themes: 1) The object of eating: the food itself.  How can the nature of food be flexibly built up and transformed? 2) The participants’ physiology (e.g. state of hunger).  How can this be constructed and rhetorically deployed in interaction? 3) The practice of eating and the notion of ‘restraint’. How can restraint (or lack of restraint) be manufactured in sequences of interaction in ways which account for, and justify, different activities? (7)

-3 families with adolescent daughters, tape-recorded over a 7 day period (15 hours of recorded conversation) (7)

-tapes transcribed to a ‘first pass’ level that captured the words used and some basic features of the delivery of talk…some aspects transcribed at a Jeffersonian level.

-discursive psychology and conversation analysis with a concern for the constructive and action-oriented nature of the participants’ talk; how the participants themselves made sense of, and oriented towards, each other’s utterances

-studying eating as it occurs in everyday life has illustrated how it may be redefined as an individual behaviour (13)

Glossary of Transcript  Symbols with an Introduction (Gail Jefferson)

Doing Conversation...

Luff, P. & Heath, C. (2012). Some ‘technical challenges’ of video analysis: social actions, objects, material realities and the problems of perspective. Qualitative Research 12, 255-279.

This article discussed the challenges in working with video recordings, esp. in terms of doing analysis of the data.  The article was accessible and great illustrations of the issues that can show up in this type of work and for me, there were two key paragraphs that kind of summed up the main points:

1. 'If the concern of the analysis involves assessing and accounting for the participants' own perspective on the ongoing activities, it can be problematic to determine how the conduct recorded by each camera is seen and understood by the different participants' (267).
2. The use of video recordings to analyze the use of technologies and objects in workplace settings cannot be accomplished by only scrutinizing the recordings.  Indeed, the analysis of the video materials that have been collected typically requires considerable knowledge about the activities of the participants...It is therefore necessary to undertake fieldwork before and often alongside the collection of recordings (271).  

Throughout the summer session and the opening of this semester, I have repeatedly focused on context and in our discussions, I kept thinking about how video recordings could be an answer to some of my worries.  I think that body language is so important and that producing a transcript isn't enough to produce a text for analysis. I buy that words/discourse are actions and that so much can be learned by looking at the discourse produced by participants, but if you don't have other pieces to fit with those words, how do you determine what is being accomplished by those words?  If you lack the setting, if you lack the body language, if you lack the facial expressions, etc., how do you make meaning out of what is being said? Then, as I type this, I am going back to telephone conversations.  How does anyone make meaning out of those?  Other than that take-for-granted, joint history that people in a conversation share, they lack those elements that I just shared as my concern if you don't have video.  Which came first...chicken or egg, right?

This article made me think a little deeper about my thought processes regarding the use of video recordings and honestly, I think that it made me question, a little bit, the faith that I had in the use of video recording.  Here is part of where I am coming from.  In Intro to Qual, my project was a mini-photoethnography of sorts that sought to look at the literacy practices of veteran classroom teachers through photographs and interviews conducted in the teachers classrooms.  I gave teachers a disposable camera and had them photograph the elements in their classroom that they felt comprised the literacy elements of their classrooms.  I did an initial coding of the photographs and an initial mapping of the classrooms, before sitting down with the teachers to discuss the pictures.  I have since been thinking that as a novice researcher that it would have been helpful for me to have had a video recording of the interviews in order to capture the elements of the interviews and the setting that I missed by just using mapping and audio recording.  After reading the article, I see challenges that this could have added to my study and how would I have ever been able to decide where to stop the analysis of the setting.  I think that I have also been tying video recording to greater transparency (or validity?) for the study than can be achieved using audio recording alone.  This article made me think about how easily it would have been to mis-out on a lot of things, because people are unpredictable.  They are constantly moving and shifting.  It would be really easy to miss out on the same elements (facial expressions, body language, setting, etc.) that wouldn't have been present in audio recordings, because the scope of the lens and the location of the participants.  

I think what I ultimately took from the article was something that Allison tried to instill in me way back in Intro to Qual, but that I have to keep be reminded of and learn.  There is no real safeguard or easy way out in qualitative research.  There is no fail safe.  Qualitative researchers have to work hard to make sure that they know themselves and their positionality.  They have to know their setting and they need to know their participants.  They need to know that, especially as they are developing research skills, that they need to use a variety of measures to ensure that they get the data needed to answer their research questions.  Video can be one way to do that, but it isn't foolproof.  Audio is another way to collect data, but skills have to be developed to make sure that you are using it accurately. Is this what you were hoping that we took away from this article?  The use of video is growing, but it isn't the safety net for our research that a lot of us have been thinking that it is?

Rapley, T. (2007). Doing conversation, discourse and document analysis. London: Sage. 

I think that you alluded to this as we were ending class last week as something that you expected to happen, but this session's readings were much appreciated.  The text wasn't necessarily a 'how-to' text on doing conversation, discourse, or document analysis, but it was one of those texts that was written in an accessible format for people new to this work to be able to gain a rudimentary understanding of these types of analysis.  Something that I especially appreciated or actually was excited about was the 'Key Points' section at the end of each chapter.  As I came to the end of each chapter, it excited me that I had picked out the key points as I was reading.  I promise that this wasn't the case as I am reading Kuhn for 640.  This reading was very appreciated.  In fact, any other non-course reading recommendations such as this would be greatly appreciated, especially if you have one like this for discursive psychology.  I am still positive that I am missing the piece of the puzzle that makes it all fit together for me.

One of the early things that I connected to in the readings was the contextual categorizations that can be attributed to participant's use of discourse.  'The focus is on what specific version of the world, or identity, or meaning is produced by describing something in just that way over another way; what is made available and what is excluded by describing something this way over an alternative way (2).'  The author gave a list of his attributes and how they are dependent on context.  A similar list could have been compiled by me.  My list in comparison to author’s list… I work with young children.  I am old if you ask my students.  My mother-in-law is 83 years old.  In her eyes, I am young at 35 and still in the learning stage of my life. Although I am working on a doctorate program and I will be a Ph.D. I won’t be a doctor. On a more personal level there is the issue of my parents.  I was raised by my grandparents and for financial reasons, I was adopted by them at 19 years of age.  On paper, on legal documents, they are my parents. My biological mother is my sister.  (Only in TN, right?) However, I am strongly tied to my father even though he died when I was young.  He will always be my father.  If you ask me about my parents, he is my dad and my mom is the person who gave birth to me.  A similar story could be discussed concerning my name.  All of our attributes can be tied to the context that we are in.  Does it make any of them less true or make me dishonest when I share things differently in different settings? That list helped me see or be more readily understanding of what you have been saying when you talk about that participants discourse can be seen as 'true' and not necessarily manipulative, because often the discourse is context based and used for the context. I think...

Rapley shared that 'an interview or focus group study that only uses participants’ accounts to understand people’s day-to-day practices seems problematic' (20). I think that this is true, but it is an area that I am now trying to gain an understanding of how best to accomplish this. In the reading, I tied it back to my interest in context.  One account, one snapshot, etc. doesn't provide insight for me in what the participant is trying to accomplish with their language.  If you are trying to gain insight into how literacy-based a teacher is or what practices that they use in their classroom, then you need more than one account to determine how this actually looks.  But, as I am typing this, I keep going back to the expression, 'There is no truth...'  Does multiple interviews, multiple observations, really provide more 'truth' than the one interview, the one observation? Am I throwing into the outfield again?  Still, I think that is what makes ethnography work so appealing.  By studying something in depth like ethnographers do, a greater understanding of the phenomenon or situation can be obtained, because you are really engrossed in all elements of the project.  Multiple facets can be examined and analyzed leading hopefully to a greater 'truth'.

Book Notes...

Chapter 1: Studying Discourse

This book aims to explore how you can research language in use (1).

For those analyzing discourse the primary interest is in how language is used in certain contexts.  And the context can range from a specific amount in a conversation to a specific historical period (2).

On a gross level, people studying discourse see language as performative and functional: language is never treated as a neutral, transparent, means of communication (2).

--example of two different news headlines and discussion of whether one is less true than the other

Such categorizations can be dependent on such contextual factors as the age of the other people, the specific context of social norms (3).

How I choose to describe myself and how others describe me, can, and does, have effects (3).

Documents produce specific realities and the realities they produce have effects (3).

Our understanding of things, concepts or ideas that we might take for granted like ‘sexuality’, ‘madness’ or ‘instincts’ is not somehow natural or pre-given but rather is the product of human actions and interactions, human history, society and culture (4).

It is essential that anyone who wants to conduct research has respect for those people they are researching and demonstrates this with their action throughout the life of the project (5-6).

Chapter 2: Generating an archive

Possible Data Sources:

1) data you have to generate, aka researcher-generated

2) data that already exists, aka already existing data (8-9)

Data Sources Could Include: videotapes; audiotapes; transcripts of interactions and/or interviews; handwritten and typed field notes (before, during, after); field notes, audiotapes, and minutes of research team meetings; official site documents (forms, reports, etc.); academic research papers; leaflets, handouts, newspaper cuttings; website; and, notes to self, memos, and quotes (9).

Rather than just think about ‘generating data’, in any narrow sense, you need to think about generating or producing an archive—a diverse collection of materials that enable you to engage with and think about the specific research problem or question.  On a practical level, this means collecting and managing an array of different materials…tied to ‘both your specific research question and your theoretical trajectory (10).

Document-Based Sources: newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, magazine front covers, dating adverts, academic publications, government publications, parliamentary debates, diaries, biographies, literature, poetry, blogs, web-based diaries, internet sources (email, news groups, bulletin boards, etc.)

Primary Sources: historically contemporary and/or first-hand accounts

Secondary Sources: historically or spatially distant and/or second-hand sources

Tip:  Often the best starting point is to read other academic work on the specific topic and to find out what documents they used and where they found them (17).

Audio- and Visual-Based Sources: radio and television programmes; televised debates; documentaries; radio talk-shows; soap operas, drama serials, plays or films; interviews and focus groups

By using audio and video recordings and observations of ‘naturally occurring’ interactions over interviews, or experiences or imagining you already know, you can gain a different perspective on people’s actions and interactions (20).

For me, an interview or focus group study that only uses participants’ accounts to understand people’s day-to-day practices seems problematic (20). 

Whether it is an interview, a focus group, or an observation of an office or supermarket, you should be sensitive that people’s actions and interactions are contextually situated. We massively shape our actions and interactions to ‘fit with’ (and so reproduce) the, often, unspoken, norms, rules and expectations of the specific context we find ourselves in (20).

Chapter 3: Ethics and Recording ‘Data’

Your research should not cause any harm or distress, either psychological or physical, to anyone taking part in it.  Anyone taking part in the research should be aware what the research is about and consent to take part in it (24).

Ethical Guidelines:

1.     Seek permission to make the recording and get consent for any use or disclosure…informed consent written in ready accessible format without academic jargon or shorthand.

2.     Give participants adequate information about the purpose of the recording when seeking their participation.

3.     Ensure that participants are under no pressure to give permission for the recording to be made.

4.     Do not participate in any recording made against a participant’s wishes.

5.     Stop the recording if the participant asks you to, or if it is having an adverse effect on the participant or research setting.

6.     Do not use the recording for purposes outside of the scope of the original consent for use, without obtaining further consent.

7.     Ensure that the recording does not compromise the participant’s privacy and dignity.

8.     Make appropriate secure arrangements for storage of recordings.

Chapter 4: Practices of Recording

Rubin and Rubin (1995) note four key areas around recruitment:

1.     finding knowledgeable participants;

2.     getting a range of views;

3.     testing emerging themes with new participants; and

4.     choosing participants to extend results (38).

Potential Costs of Video Recording:

ð     participants may be less likely to agree to take part

ð     participants may take a long time to get accustomed to the equipment

ð     an additional researcher may have to operate the video camera (40)

Through prior fieldwork you should already be aware of what sort of actions you want to be able to record; they often include:

ð     the faces, gestures and (parts of) the bodies of participants;

ð     any tools or equipment or other objects they use; and

ð     any documents they use.

Chapter 5: Transcribing Audio and Video Materials

-Audio, increasingly video, recordings of talk and interactions, although never a comprehensive record of what is going on, allow us access to many of the practices of social life (50).

-transcripts are by their very nature translations (50).

-base your analysis on the recording and your field note (50).

-seek permission before recording and you must seek permission before using recording that was a part of a television recording (50)

-recordings and transcripts themselves are always selective and always partial (51)

-At the simplest level, a transcript can merely be a description of the recorded event (51).

-verbatim transcript: where you try to document the words that were spoken alongside who spoke them (52)

-elements of transcripts: title of transcript (technical and descriptive); identified speaker on left, line number of each line in transcript, and rendered participants' talk (54-56)

-titles for transcript: technical title (identifies just where the extract comes from) and descriptive title (stretch of talk this is allowing you to work from more than just memory) (54)

-author personally doesn't like doing any analysis from just transcripts alone (59)

-Jeffersonian Transcript: 1960's, Gale Jefferson, industry standard for conversation analysis (59)

-approximately 8 hours to transcribe 15 minutes of talk at Jeffersonian level of transcription (63)

-For the author, 'the utterly precise timing of a pause is less important than the presence of a pause, and how, if at all, people respond to that pause' (63).

-2 stages of transcription: 1) working transcript; 2) reporting transcript (63-64)

-Working with Video-Based Data: gaze; touch; gestures; posture; spatial positioning; other actions (64-65)

Chapter 1 Key Points:

ð     Language, written or spoken, is never treated as a neutral, transparent, means of communication. Instead, language is understood as performative and functional.

ð     People studying discourse are interested in how language is used in certain contexts.  The focus is on how specific identities, practices, knowledges or meanings are produced by describing something in just that way over another way.

ð     Our understanding of things, concepts or ideas that we might take for granted are not somehow natural or pre-given but rather the product of human actions and interactions, human history, society and culture (7).

Chapter 2 Key Points:

ð     You should generate an archive—a diverse collection of materials that enable you to engage with and think about the specific research problem or questions.  Your archive could contain document-based sources as well as audio- and visual-based sources.

ð     Read other academic work on your specific topic and find out what research materials they used and how they collected them.

ð     Rather than solely relying on researcher-initiated audio- and visual-based materials, for example, interviews or focus groups, some academics argue that you should focus on ‘naturally occurring data’ (22).

Chapter 3 Key Points:

ð     It is your duty to be aware of the relevant guidelines, recommendations, or codes of ethical conduct that could apply to the research you undertake.

ð     Your research should not cause any harm or distress, either psychological or physical, to anyone taking part in it. 

ð     You should never place yourself in any potentially dangerous situation (32).

Chapter 4 Key Points:

ð     Learn about your recording equipment prior to entering the field.  Just keep playing with it as often as you can.

ð     Realize that gaining access to the field (and working in the field) will often take up much more of your time than you initially imagined.

ð     Stay flexible.  Be prepared to modify your ideas about what constitutes the best sources and opportunities to record ‘data’ (47).

Chapter 5 Key Points:

ð     Your recordings and transcripts are always selective and always partial.

ð     Try not to undertake all of your analysis from just the transcript of a recording.  Transcripts are living, evolving, documents—they are always susceptible to change and alterations.

ð     When you start to make detailed transcriptions it can be really helpful to work with someone else, to work jointly on the same recording and help each other out both with what you heard and how to reproduce it on the page (70).