Applications

Communication in medicine, counselling, and healthcare is perhaps the largest area of ‘applied’ CA (see Heritage and Maynard, 2006), with significant training possibilities for healthcare practitioners. For example, in a project commissioned by a helpline for women in trauma after childbirth, recorded extracts are now used when training midwives and other care-providers to give more effective support to women post-natally (Kitzinger & Kitzinger, 2007).

We selected recordings that – our analysis showed – offered good illustrations of the appropriate use of interactional features, such as story prompts, or silence (and also some that illustrate more problematic interactions). Compared with role-play – used in earlier workshops for the helpline – the recorded data make for a much more vivid and immediate understanding of interactional issues, and encourage self-reflective practice.

Along with medical and helpline interaction (Shaw and Kitzinger, 2007; Kitzinger & Kitzinger, 2007), key applied research areas within CA include counselling and psychotherapy (Peräkylä, 1995); classroom interaction (Koshik, 2001), news interviews (Clayman and Heritage, 2002) and calls to the emergency services (Zimmerman, 1992). Findings from all these domains are potentially of key interest both to practitioners and to policy makers. For example, the Department for Work and Pensions has recently commissioned a group of us at the University of York to investigate the interaction between personal advisers (PAs) and benefit claimants in Jobcentre Plus interviews (Drew, Toerien, Irvine and Sainsbury, ongoing research), to identify what constitutes effective practice.

Direct commercial applications of CA are still in their infancy, but are advancing most rapidly in California (the birthplace of CA) with the work of researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC). They have used conversation analysis in designing an electronic guidebook, Sotto Voce, for visitors to historic homes, museums and other attractions (Woodruff et al, 2002). This group has also described practical strategies for integrating a conversation analyst into a research design team (Woodruff et al, 2004).