A foreword by Ailean Mills

How often do we focus on naturally occurring conversation? Maybe it’s time to review the number of questions we ask, how we ask them – and, indeed, whether these questions block naturally occurring conversation.

Conversational analysis is the ethnographic approach to the linguistic world. It is not about the interpretation of inner cognitive states, motivations or drivers, but purely about how verbal interaction is organized.

This approach accepts that people do not have insight into their own motives – social psychologists have long been suspicious of the veracity of people’s description of their own internal states, seeing conscious or unconscious ‘fraud’ in self-reporting.

This non-cognitive social psychology looks at everyday chatter, the architecture of conversation, processes of interaction and how we persuade ourselves – not at underlying intra-psychic psychological desires or dispositions. Its bedrock is that talk is action.

In the past, it has tended to live in academic worlds, but there are some signs of a break out. So what does this mean for commercial market researchers? Well, there are clear gems buried beneath screeds of technical coding language and analyses of speech production that can be very off-putting. We need to step over the intellectual explanations of post-structuralist modified semiology and its superiority over traditional interpretative studies.

And, engaged as we are in moderating and facilitation, ‘turn-taking’, the sequencing of question and answer, we should be keen to make the effort.

There is a stark reminder of the ‘experimenter effect’, response bias, that the qualitative research moderator, as the leader, the person ‘in power’, can determine and distort the discourse of a discussion from the very outset, determining in advance the next 89 minutes of any focus group. The choice of language, and its structure, will be quickly mimicked by participants.

CA can also nudge us about the subtle cues that we project in the wording or sequencing of questioning, and the huge influence that we carry, in the timing and structure of the questions we pose. Delay, stress and selection of words will all affect the responses we get back – each ‘turn’ needs to be understood in terms of the sequence in which it is embedded.

Sufficient sensitivity?

Are we sensitive enough to the silences and what they communicate, to the delays, the unexpected speaker changeovers? And do we take into account the linguistic and social conventions that will be different in the natural settings of discussing a loo cleaner from, let’s say, a mobile phone? Do we risk assuming that we can capture such different discourse in the viewing room?

Questions also arise over transcription. We usually record the actual words, but how often does the transcriber pick up the silences, the raised questioning voice, the rough interruption or the laughter?

And the discussion guide can be perceived through this lens as a blocking mechanism. Vitally, CA puts its emphasis on ‘naturally occurring language’ and could it be time to re-examine the value of that discourse from consumers and just how much, or how little, we hear of it in commercial qualitative research?

Ethnography and the focus group may currently stand just too far apart. How important, for example, is that ‘aside’ between respondents that can frustrate and irritate the ‘proper flow’ of the session, that we will ‘hush up’ as it does not look so good to the watching clients? How much natural discourse do we allow consumers to initiate, or are their responses preceded too often by a posed question?

If we are to believe CA and the contemporary theories behind it, participants will arrive at understanding of each others’ actions during the back and forth of interaction – and we will gain our analysis of collective social actions from letting this natural discourse take place unhindered.

For all qualitative researchers it has to raise issues about the number of questions we ask, how we ask them and, crucially, how much they block a core and strategic component of what we do and which distinguishes us from quantitative research – naturally occurring conversation.

Its detailed microscopic approach shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Language orders our perception in subtle ways and makes things happen.

The worlds of media and medicine are also listening carefully. In the US, conversational analysts looked at verbal interactions between plastic surgeons and patients. Their analysis showed how the patient’s body and its aesthetic features could be used by plastic surgeons as interpretive resources to promote the desirability of surgery.

By touching excess tissue, pinching it, moving it, talking about it and asking questions, plastic surgeons literally bring to life patients' bodily ‘flaws’. As medicine meets consumerism, medical activities turn persuasive, constructing the body as a territory of surgical need.

Media analysts are studying televised political debates to look at the contribution of micro-level interactive patterns to the construction of the macro level of the social role of the media, e.g. President Obama’s language structure in debate. The upward tilt of his head as he voiced a positive sentiment did not go unnoticed.

Minutiae of casual ‘Q&A’

In political rhetoric and among professionals an awareness of the minutiae of the casual ‘question and answer’, and its effect on decisions and outcomes, is growing.

Personally, coming from a highly ‘interpretative’ background, I have found it good re-training to focus on unobtrusively detailed listening and recording without fast recourse to analysis or interpretation.