Transcript A conversation about methods exploring conversation “IT IS POSSIBLE THAT THE DETAILED STUDY OF SMALL PHENOMENA MAY GIVE AN E N O R M.

A conversation about methods exploring
conversation
“IT IS POSSIBLE THAT THE DETAILED STUDY
OF SMALL PHENOMENA MAY GIVE AN
E N O R M O U S U N D E R S T A N DI N G O F T H E W A Y
HUMANS DO THINGS AND THE KINDS OF
OBJECTS THEY USE TO CONSTRUCT AND
ORDER THOSE AFFAIRS” (SACKS 1984, P. 24)
KELLY FREEBODY
READING, DESIGNING RESEARCH 2013
Why am I
interested?
In drama above all you can’t make vague
promises…When you say something like,
‘Drama is good for their language’, get rid of it.
It doesn’t tell anybody how it does it because
it’s too vague. ‘Drama is good for their
personality and all that’ – get rid of it because
it does a great deal of harm. It doesn’t point to
what we really have to consider, which is –
how does it do it? ( Heathcote cited in
Anderson 2004, p. 31)
Conversation analysis
So what tradition are we working in?
 Qualitative
 Social science
 Conversation analysis is : “an approach within the social sciences that
aims to describe, analyze and understand talk as a basic and
constitutive feature of human life...
 ... What is most important for conversation analysis is not the theories
it produces or even the methods it employs but rather the work of
grappling with some small bit of the world in order to get an analytic
handle on how it works” (Sidnell 2010 p. 1)
Social interaction is
the primordial
means through
which the business of
the social world is
transacted, the
identities of the
participants are
affirmed or denied,
and its cultures are
transmitted,
renewed, and
modified
(Goodwin & Heritage 1990,
p.283)
Image from http://www.las.iastate.edu/newnews/alasarchives0506.shtml
Some history…
 Conversation analysis was developed in the 1960s by Harvey Sacks,
Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson
 Other methods in a similar style but with a different world view:
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Socio linguistic analysis
Discourse analysis
 Greatly informed by:
 Erving Goffman
 Harold Garfinkel
 While others at the time were concerned with talk only as relevant to a
larger theory, these theorists were interested in social interaction and
the ways interaction built the norms of social life
Goffman – Interested in the way we ‘present’ ourselves in everyday life.
He thought social interaction (conversation) was the foundation of
everything in society (moral order, expectations, rules, standards, and
so on).
Garfinkel was interested in the way social order was evident in our
interactions. He conducted ‘breaching experiments’ where he got
participants to ignore ‘normal’ patterns of interaction. For example:
 (S) How are you?
 (E) How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school
work, my peace of mind, my…?
 (S) (Red in the face and suddenly out of control) Look! I was just trying
to be polite. Frankly, I don’t give a damn how you are.
 (Garfinkel 1967, p.44)
Harvey Sacks
“I figured that sociology could not be an actual science unless it was
able to handle the details of actual events, handle them formally, and in
the first instance be informative about them in the direct ways in which
primitive sciences tend to be informative, that is, that anyone else can
go and see whether what was said is so” (Sacks 1984, p.26).
 For Sacks, two important functions of CA
 that it kept its grip “on the primary data of the social world” (Heritage 1984, p.235);
 that it was testable and examinable by more than the sociologist performing the
analysis.
CA - Some bits and pieces
 Talk-in-interaction is structurally organised;
 Contributions to talk-in-interaction are contextually oriented,
specifically that all interaction is both context shaping and context
renewing; and
 No order of detail can be dismissed a priori as disorderly, accidental or
irrelevant (Heritage 1984)
‘Order at all points’ vs ‘the bucket theory’
 “Entailed in this view of context is the abandonment of what may be
termed the ‘bucket’ theory of context in which some re-established
social framework is viewed as ‘containing’ the participants’ actions.
Instead the CA perspective embodies a dynamic approach in which
‘context’ is treated as both the project and the product of the
participants’ own actions and therefore as inherently locally produced
and transformable at any moment” (Drew and Heritage 1992 P19)
 Context – broad context (such as school) and interactional context.
For example:
1. Rose: why don’t you come and see me some[times
2. Bea:
[I would like to
3. Rose: I would like you to
(From Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998, p.48)
 Action – “does anyone want a cookie?” is analysed according to what
it achieves (an offer) rather than what it’s about (cookies)
Membership categorisaton analysis
 Concerned with how, in their everyday interactions, people draw on
understandings of identities as they exist in social categorises
 Membership categories are classifications of classes of people that carry
with them clusters of expectable features, such as personality traits,
preferences, or possible actions
 Attributions of categories have moral and cultural implications
 Moral reasoning can take place either topically, or be drawn upon as
a resource, when a particular categorisation is made publicly
available within an interaction
MCA – some bits and pieces
• Membership Categories (Identities in talk)
• Broader category collections – MCDs
• E.g., Teacher belongs to MCD School
• Female teacher – MCD School and MCD Gender
• Asian Female teacher – MCD School, Gender, Race.
• Not all are always relevant.
Eglin and Hester (1992) 8 types of categories
• Transient categorisation (e.g., child)
• Event-consequent (e.g., widower)
• Event-specific (e.g., best-man)
• Action/activity-consequent (e.g., murderer)
• Behaviourally implicative (e.g., saint)
• Belief dependent (e.g., catholic)
• Ability/competence categorisations (e.g., doctor)
• Naturally based (e.g., woman)
Moral reasoning...
• any person who is a case of a category is seen as a member of the
category, what’s known about the category is known about them, and
the fate of each is bound up in the fate of the other, so that one regularly
has systems of social control built up around these categories which are
internally enforced by the members because if a member does
something like rape a white woman, commit economic fraud, race on
the street, etc., then that thing will be seen as what a member of some
applicable category does, not what some named person did. And the
rest of them will have to pay for it (Sacks 1979, p.13).
 Therefore... Shared understandings are build, through ‘talking a
category into being’ about what kind of person a category is.
 EG Category Mother contains general attributions about what a mother
is (such as caring, maternal etc). These attributions have moral
implications
What do these methods tell us about talk in schools?
Organisation of institutional talk generally
 Lexical choice – technical language, use of pronouns etc
 Turn design
 Sequence organisation – the importance of the third turn in a three part
sequence.
 Overall structural organisation
 Social epistemology and social relations (caution, asymmetry)
(Drew and Heritage 1992)
A focus on asymmetry
 Institutional interactions are characteristically asymmetrical.
 There is often a direct relationship between status (or role) and
discursive rights (or obligations)
 Asymmetry in institutional talk commonly arises from question-answer
patterns of interactions, with little opportunity for particular roles to
take initiative.
 A further asymmetrical dimension is participants differential states of
knowledge (one participants claim to all the relevant knowledge).
Specifically classroom talk?
 Students viewed as pre-competent (rather than competent or in-competent)
 Talk is therefore often focused on what Students don’t know or have in relation to
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what Teachers do
As a result, regular conversation features are not often found in classrooms (for
example, teacher’s don’t often say ‘oh’ and often ask ‘exam questions’
Pre-planned by the teacher (topic, turn taking, activity sequences) means the
teacher is ‘in the know’ about upcoming sequences and can therefore make
decisions about the relevance of student ideas or interactions
Sequence organisation is driven by teachers – they can make decisions about turn
taking, commence a discussion without referring to it’s relevance, change a topic
without giving reason, and, most importantly, provide sanctions to those who depart
from the teacher-driving turn taking structure.
IRE is a prominent way in which teachers and students organise talk in classrooms.
Socio Cultural Talk
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Trac:
his parents are selfish
Lin:
that’s what I was just going to say
Nick:
why (.) why do you say that
Trac:
because he’s like really smart and he wants to
go and be one of those genius people, really smart
the parents don’t want him to go (.)
Nick:
they’re encouraging him not to go aren’t they (.)
why
Trac:
because they’re [( )]
Nick:
[just prove] to me you were listening, go on
Trac:
because they were poor and they wanted him to
look after his brothers and sisters
people, and
Moral reasoning? One example
 Teacher
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is it^ would somebody else like to talk to me about that now hang
on (.) sh sh one at a time
Trac
um if she goes along with her parents like she does the um doctor
thing she might end up liking it (1) and if she took the mechanic thing and
she didn’t like it
Darr
she does like it
Trac
yeah but then if she took the mechanic thing and she didn’t like it
then she’s already disowned so (.)
Teacher ok so you’re saying (.) interesting point so you’re saying
Trac
she like if she became a doctor and she liked it and if she became a
mechanic and she didn’t like it
What sorts of questions/topics can this method explore?
 How learning is facilitated in schools
 through an understanding of teacher talk (such as how questions are used)
 Exploring how teachers indoctrinate students into particular ways of inquiry (such as
how to think like a historian or a scientist)
 How moral reasoning is developed in classrooms – perhaps focused on
a particular issue

How people from different background respond to similar questions
 Structural details that inform us about how MCD Schools ‘work’
 for example, teacher’s don’t often say ‘oh’ – details tell us much about the different
relationships teachers and students have to knowledge
If some activity is
important to our
lives, then
knowing how it is
organized may
make a difference
to how we act
(Heap 1990)
So.. Why do the work?
Starting points
 ten Have, P. Methodological issues in conversation analysis.
www.pscw.uva.nl/emca/mica.htm.)
 Conversation Analysis materials:
http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/emca
 Methodological issues in CA http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/emca/Mica.htm
 Get started in CA page:
http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/sitemenu.htm
References
 Anderson, M. 2004. Possibilities for research, advocacy, and policy in the 20th century. NJ, 28(2), p. 31-40.
 Drew, P. & Heritage, J., 1992. Analyzing talk at work: an introduction. In P. Drew & J. Heritage, eds. Talk at
work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 3-65.
 Eglin, P. & Hester, S., 1992. Category, predicate and task: The pragmatics of practical action. Semiotica, 88, p.
243–68.
 Garfinkel, H., 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Goodwin, C. & Heritage, J., 1990. Conversation Analysis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19, p. 283-307.
 Heap, J. L., 1990. Applied Ethnomethodology: Looking for the local rationality of reading activities. Human
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Studies, 13 p, 36-72.
Heritage, J., 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge UK: Polity Press.
Hutchby, I. & Wooffitt, R., 1998. Conversation analysis. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Sacks, H., 1979. Hotrodder: A revolutionary category. In G. Psathas, ed. Everyday language: Studies in
Ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington Publishers, p. 1-14.
Sacks, H., 1984. Notes on methodology. In J. Maxwell Atkinson & J. Heritage, eds. Structures of social action:
Studies in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 21-28.
Sidnell, J. 2010. Conversation analysis: An introduction. West Sussex: Blackwell Pulbishing.