Resources

Unit 5: Conversation Analysis

Chapter overview

Learning objectives

Study unit 5 will help you to:

  • Engage critically with how multimodality has been taken up in CA
  • Familiarize yourself with key principles and concepts of CA
  • Try out some basic CA methods of transcription and analysis

Overview Chapter 5

Topics

  • The origins of CA and its connection with multimodality
  • Key CA principles and concepts
  • Methods of transcription and analysis
  • Fields of application, limitations, potentialities and challenges of CA

Summary

We opened Chapter 5 with a brief history of CA, sketching its development in the US in the early 1960s as an approach in sociology. We explained that CA is concerned with people’s ‘lived experiences’, which it explores through detailed observation and analysis of social interaction. We outlined how in the 1970s Goodwin, and later Heath, Mondada and others began to expand CA by analysing video recordings of everyday interactions, prompting interest in the role of gaze, gesture and other resources in what is now often called ‘multimodal interaction’.

We set out the key principles and processes of a CA approach. We discussed the CA principle of staying close to the selected video clip (i.e. avoiding high inferences, grounding claims in visible and audible features in the clip) and ‘slowing down’ the analytical processto recognize ‘order’ in the ways in which people organize themselves in and through interaction. Each action is understood in relation to the action that preceded and followed. That key principle provides a basis for making claims about the meanings that people make. We introduced the key concepts that have been used in accounts of multimodal interaction:

  • Mutual elaboration of semiotic resources. The notion that people ‘build action’ using distinctly different, mutually elaborating ‘semiotic resources’.
  • Sequential organization of action. The principle that action unfolds in time, one action after another.
  • Coordination of action. The idea that the accomplishment of collaborative work demands coordinated, concerted action.
  • Multi-activity. The phenomenon that different activities possibly involving different, sometimes partially overlapping participants, operate in conjunction to pursue concurrent courses of action.

We noted that in CA video recordings of ‘naturally occurring’ social encounters are used as data, i.e. encounters that are not initiated by the researcher. Short clips are then selected for detailed transcription and analysis. We discussed CA transcription conventions and their central role in the analytical process, and discussed the process of producing a transcript. We also outlined the typical research questions and applications that CA is used to address, and discussed the limitations of this approach.

Study questions

Read Chapter 5 and think about how you would answer the questions below. Make notes of your responses and review them when you have completed the study guide.

  1. How is the term ‘mode’ used within a CA approach?
  2. What does the concept of ‘mutual elaboration’ mean to you?
  3. Reflect on the models of transcription presented in Chapter 5 and their differences
  4. What kind of insights does a CA approach offer to the study of multimodality?

Exercises

Exercise 5.1: Warranting claims – staying close to the data and slowing down

In Chapter 5 we discussed the centrality of staying close to the selected video clip and slowing down. This means that when you adopt a CA approach the claims that you make about what happens in the recorded interaction should always be grounded in observations in the clip. While it is important to know a good deal about the context in which the interaction occurred, the focus is always on what happens in this clip.

  1. Select a paper from one of the suggested readings for this chapter.
  2. Read it to see how the author makes claims about what happens in the interaction that is presented.
  3. How do the concepts discussed above feature in the account of the interaction?
  4. Is the analysis plausible, if yes, why and if not, why not?

Exercise 5.2: Analysing sequentiality

  1. Reflect on Heritage’s (1997) proposal that every action is ‘context-shaped’ in that it acts as a response to the previous action, and at the same time it is ‘context-creating’, in that it raises expectations about what is to happen next.
  2. Make a short video recording of an everyday interaction (e.g. use your phone to make a 2–3 minute video recording of family or friends cooking a meal, dining, or playing a game).
  3. View the clip or a part of it and describe the setting, and the participants and the social roles they enact. The aim of these viewing sessions is to collect ‘noticings’ from different perspectives.
    • What kind of activity/activities are they engaged in?
    • How are they using gaze, gesture, objects (e.g. kitchen tool, cook-book), body placement, and talk?
    • Are people doing what’s expected of them, or are they doing something different? What are they orienting to?
    • How is the activity built up / how does it unfold in time? Why did it unfold in the way it did?
    • How did the actions of each person shape what another person did and said next, how did they take turns?

Tip: It is important to suspend judgements about what you see. Move from description to interpretation. Look for evidence in the clip for all claims made about what happens. Whenever you make an observation, ask yourself, ‘How do I know?’

Exercise 5.3: Analysing coordination of action

  1. Video record instances of object passings, e.g. of food at the dinner table, or at a market stall (you might also find examples on YouTube).
  2. View the clip repeatedly. What can you say about how the passing is achieved? What resources do the participants draw on and how are they mutually modifying?
  3. Make a transcript of one object passing. Visualize on a timeline the direction of gaze, and the movement of the hands of the various participants and transcribe what they say. What can you say now about the accomplishment of the passing? Has the transcript validated or challenged your initial noticings?

Tip: Use ELAN to systematically represent the sequential unfolding of simultaneously produced actions. In this way you can render the degree of alignment between different participants and their actions visible.

Suggested resources

Key reading

Streeck, J., Goodwin, C. & LeBaron, C. (2011). Embodied interaction in the material world: An introduction. In Streeck, J., Goodwin, C. & LeBaron, C. (Eds.) Embodied Interaction. Language and Body in the Material World (pp. 1–26). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heath, C., Luff, P. & Hindmarsh, J. (2010). Video in Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

Further reading

Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1489–1522.

Streeck, J., Goodwin, C. and LeBaron, C. (Eds.) Embodied Interaction. Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Online resources

ELAN Transcription software, a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources

Reflections from Terhi Korkiakangas on transcription in Conversation Analysis

Interview with Lorenza Mondada on social interaction analysis

Podcast of Lorenza Mondada’s keynote presentation on multimodal resources for the organisation of social interaction

Charles Goodwin’s website

Reference

Heritage, J. (1997). Conversation analysis and institutional talk: Analyzing data. In David Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice (pp. 161–182). London: Sage.