Conversation Analysis as Research Methodology (original) (raw)

2005, Applying Conversation Analysis

The aims of this concluding chapter are to tie together a number of themes which have emerged from the chapters in the collection and to reflect on the processes of research manifested in the chapters, positioning these in relation to linguistic and social science research paradigms. A frequent complaint by researchers outside CA is that CA practitioners tend not to make their methodology and procedures comprehensible and accessible to researchers from other disciplines. It has sometimes been acknowledged by CA practitioners (Peräkylä 1997) that more could be done in this respect. A full explication of CA methodology and procedures would start with a discussion of the ethnomethodological principles underpinning CA. Considerations of space prohibit such a discussion here; however, see Bergmann (1981), Heritage (1984b) and Seedhouse (2004). Similarly, this chapter cannot provide an introduction to CA methodology; however, see Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998; Psathas 1995; Seedhouse 2004; ten Have 1999. In this first section I will focus on two areas relevant to this collection, namely the CA view of language and the emic perspective. 2 CA's origins in sociology and specifically ethnomethodology entail a different perspective on the status and interest of language itself from that typical of linguistics. CA's primary interest is in the social act and only marginally in language, whereas a linguist's primary interest is normally in language. In descriptivist linguistics, the interest is in examining how aspects of language are organized in relation to each other. CA, by contrast, studies how social acts are organized in interaction. As part of this, CA is interested in how social acts are packaged and delivered in linguistic terms. The fundamental CA question 'Why this, in this way, right now?' captures the interest in talk as social action, which is delivered in particular linguistic formatting, as part of an unfolding sequence. The CA perspective on the primacy of the social act is illustrated by chapters in this collection. For example, Gafaranga and Britten found that general practitioners systematically use different 'social' opening sequences to talk different professional relationships into being and hence to establish different professional contexts. This is an example of CA analysts' interest in linguistic forms; not so much for their own sake, but rather in the way in which they are used to embody and express subtle differences in social actions with social consequences. The distinction between emic and etic perspectives is vital to the argument in this chapter. The distinction originated in linguistics and specifically in phonology, namely in the difference between phonetics and phonemics. Pike's definition of etic and emic perspectives broadened interest in the distinction in the social sciences: The etic viewpoint studies behaviour as from outside of a particular system, and as an essential initial approach to an alien system. The emic