The spotlight on Conversational Analysis

The qualitative research discipline of Conversation Analysis is a rapidly growing approach to the study of human interaction. Professor Celia Kitzinger and Merran Toerien offer an introduction.

Its practical applications are increasingly recognised and, especially over the past five years or so, it has been used in applied contexts to address the real-world concerns of service-providers, clients, user groups, stakeholders and policy makers. Let us start by highlighting some of these.

Selected Practical Applications

Conversation Analysis can play a role in a wide range of areas, including:

• Interdisciplinary impact on sociology, linguistics and social psychology
• Doctor-patient interaction (Heritage et al, 2006); (Mangione-Smith et al., 2006); (Stivers, 2005)
• Police interactions
• Counselling interaction
• Political communication – the understanding of political rhetoric
• Human-computer interaction and software design
• Treatment of speech disorders
• Interviewing, focus groups and survey methodology and the optimisation of response
• Improving public speaking (Atkinson, 1984)
• Student participation in classroom interaction
• Second language acquisition

What is conversation analysis?

CA is a theoretically and methodologically distinctive approach to understanding social life. It emerged in California in the 1960s from the work of Harvey Sacks and his collaborators Emanuel Schegloff (Schegloff, 2007) and Gail Jefferson. Its intellectual roots lie in the sociological tradition of ethnomethodology, an approach primarily concerned with how ordinary activities get done and people’s ways of making sense of the everyday social world.

Sacks did not set out to study conversation, but as a Fellow at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide in Los Angeles in 1963, he had access to recorded telephone calls to the Suicide Prevention Center. His analysis shows that some activities in these calls are neither ordinary nor everyday: accounts of suicide threats getting laughed off, and descriptions of suicide attempts to ‘discover if anyone cares’.

Nevertheless, even these conversations were full of activities most of us do every day: complaining, requesting, agreeing, and disagreeing and so on. Sacks set about analysing in detail just how these activities get done. His focus, in other words, was not primarily on the topic of suicide. Rather, he saw talk (be it about suicide or doing the dishes) as a fundamental way in which social action gets done.

Two features of his initial dataset were crucial for CA’s development. First, the data were naturally occurring, rather than researcher-generated. Sacks was analysing the record of an actual piece of social life rather than a second-hand report of it. This meant the speakers were concerned with pursuing actions in their own lives – not simply answering research questions. Second, the data were recorded, allowing Sacks to listen to them repeatedly. This enabled a much more detailed and nuanced analysis than is achievable with observational field notes or recollection. These two features of data collection remain key.

Even today, the significance of this methodological shift should not be underestimated. Focus groups and interviews remain the method of choice for the majority of qualitative researchers despite the well-recognised problems posed by researcher-generated data.

Put simply, are our research participants telling us what really happened? People’s recall is notoriously partial, possibly faulty, and heavily influenced by social desirability effects. In telling about an event, people inevitably put a ‘slant’ on it. In interview or focus group research, then, researchers face the difficulty of how to theorise the relationship between participants’ talk and the things they’re talking about. There is a gap between the data (talk about an experience) and what researchers are usually most interested in (the experience itself) (see Kitzinger, 2004).

CA sidesteps this issue entirely by examining the experience itself. In Sacks’ early work, he did not ask suicidal people to talk about their experience of calling the helpline – as so often happens in customer satisfaction surveys – but analysed instead what actually happened during real-life calls. His recordings captured the silences, overlapping talk, and dynamics (emphatically, softly or loudly, with an upward or downward intonation, and so on) that are a feature of real-life interaction.

This is crucial because CA has shown that such minutiae can be consequential for an interaction. No researcher can make notes at that level of detail, and no participant can be expected to remember exactly what they said and how they said it during a past conversation. CA, however, offers the means to understand social action as it actually happens.