Conversation analysis, doctor-patient interaction and medical communication (original) (raw)

METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (1

Conversation Analysis (CA), a research tradition that grew out of ethnomethodology, has some unique methodological features. It studies the social organization of 'conversation', or 'talk-in-interaction', by a detailed inspection of tape recordings and transcriptions made from such recordings. In this paper, I will describe some of those features in the interest of exploring their grounds. In doing so, I will discuss some of the problems and dilemma's conversation analysts deal with in their daily practice, using both the literature and my own experiences as resources. I will present CA's research strategy as a solution to ethnomethodology's problem of the 'invisibility' of common sense and describe it in an idealized form as a seven step procedure. I will discus some of the major criticisms leveled against it and touch on some current developments. Conversation Analysis is a disciplined way of studying the local organization of interactional episodes, its unique methodological practice has enabled its practitioners to produce a mass of insights into the detailed procedural foundations of everyday life. It has developed some very practical solutions to some rather thorny methodological problems. As such it is methodologically 'impure', but it works. Interests and practices of Conversation Analysis Most practitioners of CA tend to refrain, in their research reports, from extensive theoretical and methodological discussion. CA papers tend to be exclusively devoted to an empirically based discussion of specific analytic issues. This may contribute to the confusion of readers who are not familiar with this particular research style. They will use their habitual expectations, derived from established social-scientific practice, as a frames of reference in understanding this unusual species of scientific work. But a CA report will not generally have an a priori discussion of the literature to formulate hypotheses, hardly any details about research situations or subjects researched, no descriptions of sampling techniques or coding procedures, no testing and no statistics. Instead, the reader is confronted with a detailed discussion of transcriptions of recordings of (mostly verbal) interaction in terms of the 'devices' used by its participants. Some of the early articles reporting CA work, such as Schegloff & Sacks (1973), did include some explanations of the purposes of CA, however. And more recently, a growing number of introductory papers and chapters has been published that present an accessible overview of CA's theoretical and /or methodological position and/or substantive findings (2). An important addition to this literature is an edited collection of fragments from Harvey Sacks' unpublished Lectures that deal with methodological issues in CA (Sacks, 1984 a). The 'methodology' that is presented in these sources is, however, rather different in character from what one can read in the established methodological literature. There are hardly any prescriptions to be followed, if one wants to do 'good CA'. What one does find are summary descriptions of practices used in CA, together with some of the reasons for these practices. What is given may be called, in the terminology of Schenkein's (1978) introduction, a 'Sketch of an analytic mentality'. The basic reasoning in CA seems to be that methodological procedures should be adequate to the materials at hand and to the problems one is dealing with, rather than them being pre-specified on a priori grounds. While the essential characteristics of the materials, i.e. records of streams of interaction, and the

An Introduction to Interaction: Understanding Talk in Formal and Informal Settings

Language Value, Volume 7, 2015

This textbook is a comprehensive guide for (mainly, but not only) linguistics, sociology, communication and even business students on the theories and research methodologies of conversation analysis. Based on ethnomethodology, a theoretical perspective of sociology which appeared in the 1960s and which explored how people create social order, social structure and situated action (Garfinkel 1967) through the direct observation of human behaviour, conversation analysis emerged in the 1980s as an approach to the study of talk in interaction. Sacks (1984), a graduate student who worked with Garfinkel, thought of talk as the ideal source of data to study human action, as it could be tape-recorded and carefully and repeatedly examined. The conversation analysis methodology was soon found useful for the study of a wide range of conversations (formal, informal, institutional, etc.) held for a great deal of different purposes and in diverse contexts (business, education, media, legal settings, etc.)

Conversation Analysis - Oxford Bibliographies

Oxford Bibliographies, 2011

Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that emerged in the 1960s in the writings and lectures of the late sociologist Harvey Sacks and was consolidated in his collaborations with Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in the later 1960s and early 1970s. CA is not a subfield of linguistics and does not take language per se as its primary object of study. Rather, the object of study is the organization of human social interaction. However, because language figures centrally in the way humans interact, CA typically (though not necessarily) involves the analysis of talk. For all practical purposes, CA can be thought of as the study of talk in interaction and other forms of human conduct in interaction other than talk, for example, gaze, gesture, body orientations, and their combinations. The boundaries of the field are not always completely clear. In this article, however, I treat the application of the conversation analytic method as criterial to inclusion within the field.