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).