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)