Ethnomethodology (EM) and

Conversation Analysis (CA)

Fatemeh MozaffariPhD 92-93

Introduction• the role of social context • organization of talk-in-interaction • ethnomethodology and CA

• “conversation may be taken to be that familiar predominant kind of talk in which two or more participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs outside institutional settings like religious services, law courts, classrooms and the like.”

Levinson (1983, p.284)

• Approaches to the study of talk: linguistic approach, systemic functional linguistic approach, interaction analysis, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, ethnography, conversation analysis.

• The purpose of presentation

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Ethnomethodology

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Introduction • The importance of talk or talk-in-interaction• The use of language in talk• Different approaches to the study of talk• The aims of Ethnomethodology:

-to focus on how in the use of language, people employ commonsense knowledge and practical reasoning.

-to study the methods or practices that people use to accomplish their everyday lives; it is interested in how social actors provide accounts of situations.

-to investigate how members of society construct and manage their sense of social structure by examining taken for granted realities.

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Historical Background • Origin

It is a fairly recent sociological perspective, an approach to sociological inquiry founded by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel in the early 1960s.• The term

-ethno+method+ology

-the study of ‘ethnic’ (the participant’s own/insider perspective) methods of production and interpretation of social interaction-member’s method

• Harold Garfinkel (1917 –2011)

-Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967)-He is influenced by Talcott Parsons and Durkheim and Max Weber and then phenomenologists Alfred Schutz and Husserl . And also Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of being / Existential Phenomenology.-He inspired Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Jail Jefferson

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EM approach as a reaction to mainstream sociology

• mainstream sociology imposed sociological categories on the ordinary person• EM rejects the view that sociologist’s knowledge is superior

to the knowledge of members of society. • EM is closer to reality and the everyday actions of the real

person; it is the interpretation of everyday life by the social actors themselves• commonsense knowledge is not recognized in the sociology

of the time• EM emphasized on the local, moment-by-moment

determination of meaning in social contexts while the mainstream’s emphasis was on grand theorizing and abstracted empiricism 6

Garfinkel’s experiments of “routine grounds of everyday activities’

• the two most typical strategies of ethnomethodological research are breaching experiments and the use of tapes and transcripts.• Breaching experiments are experiments where "social

reality is violated in order to shed light on the methods by which people construct social reality.“• Different Cases of experiment• All these examples are designed to illuminate the

"common background understandings" that exist in all relationships

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A: hi, Ray. How is you girlfriend feeling?B: what do you mean, “how is she feeling” do you mean physical or mental?A: I mean how is she feeling? What’s the matter with you?B: nothing. Just explain a little clearer what do you

mean?A: skip it. How are you Med School applications

coming?B: what do you mean, “how are they?”A: you know what I mean.B: I really don’t.A: what’s the matter with you? Are you sick? 8

The Principles of Ethnomethodology

• indexicality• documentary method of interpretation• reciprocity of perspective• normative accountability • reflexivity

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A Critique of ethnomethodology• EM is neglectful of the importance of studying society on a

wider scale. It neglects that mundane activities of people are constrained by social factors that cannot be appreciated through such small-scale analysis.

• It does not promote equality changes to the existing social world, especially constrained by its methodology, and therefore from this perspective is limited in its usefulness of studying the everyday functioning of society.

• the invisibility of commonsense’.• lacks both a formally stated theory and a formal

methodology• Garfinkel’s breaching experiment is challenged from an

ethical point of view.• The conversation analysis sphere of ethnomethodology also

has its own limitations;

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Conversation Analysis

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Overview• CA emerged out of EM • CA is a set of method for working with audio and video

recordings of talk and social interaction. it is the result of applying EM principles to naturally occurring talk. Talk-in-interaction is the object of inquiry in CA. CA studies the organization and the order of social actions in interaction. This organization and order is produced and oriented to by the inetractans and should be uncovered an described by the analyst’s emic perspective.

• Difference between CA and EM • Ethno studies any kind of human action but CA only studies the

human actions manifested through talk or language. • Main uses of conversation analysis• to analyze ordinary conversations• to analyze institutional talk.

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The Objectives of CA • to uncover the shared norms or cultural conventions

governing who can say what, when in particular communicative situations.

• to describe and explicate of the competences that ordinary speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible socially organized interaction

• to describe the procedures and expectancies by which conversationalists produce their own behavior and understand that of others.

• to search for patterns, ‘objective’ patterns or in Garfinkel’s term (natural facts or routine grounds of every day activities)

• to study the organization and the order of social actions in interaction

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History and Development of CA• During the 1960’s and 1970’s conversation analysis emerged

from within sociology and, in particular, from EM sociologists • The chief originator of CA is Harvey Sacks although in

collaboration with two of his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff and Geil Jefferson.

• They were inspired by two important sociologists, Erving Goffman’s conception of the interaction order and Harold Garfinkel’s structure of social action through EM approaches.

• Sack’s idea was radical in his time where the dominant view was Chomskian linguistic view

• How did CA start in sociology? With a puzzle • Sack’s story…

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(From Sacks, 1992, vol. I: 3)

A: this is Mr. Smith, may I help you?B: I can’t hear you. A: This is Mr SmithB: Smith

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Sacks examined the caller’s utterance ‘I can’t hear you’. He did not treat it as a straightforward report of a communication problem, he examined it to reveal what it might be doing (the action). Sacks raised if there is a the possibility of investigating utterances as objects which speakers use to get things done in the course of their interactions with others.

Sacks observes that there are norms concerning where in conversation certain kinds of activities should happen; and in conversation between strangers names tend to be exchanged in initial turns. Developing this, Sacks argues that the caller is using the utterance ‘I can’t hear you’ to fill the slot in the conversation where it would be expected that he return his name. and he has not had to refuse to give his name.

Sacks was not claiming that on every occasion when someone says ‘I can’t hear you’ they are avoiding giving their name; nor was he saying that doing ‘not hearing’ was the only method of avoiding giving a name. He was simply noting that it was possible to analyze how, in this instance, this particular utter-ance performed this particular activity in this particular slot, or place in the interaction.

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The core assumptions of conversation analysis

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(Heritage, 1984)

1) interaction is structurally organized2) contributions to interaction are contextually orientedthe significance of any speaker's communicative action is doubly contextual in being both context-shaped and context-renewing3) these two properties inhere in the details of

interaction so that no order of detail can be dismissed, a priori, as disorderly, accidental or irrelevant.

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(Seedhouse, 2004) principles of CA

1) There is order at all points in interaction 2) Contributions to interaction are context-shaped (reference

to sequential environment) and context-renewing (context of any next action is renewed by the current action)

3) No order of detailed can be dismissed as disorderly or accidental. This refers to the highly detailed transcription in CA

4) Analysis is bottom-up and data-driven without any prior theoretical assumptions

The essential question we ask at all stages of CA of data:Why that, in that way, right now??? Related to interaction as action (why that) expressed through linguistic forms (in that way) in a developing sequence (right now).

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CA methodology or methods

• collecting data, transcribing it, analyzing it, creating data collections, developing an analysis and theorizing the observation.• Collecting data*CA uses naturally occurring interaction as a source of data and it embraces both verbal and non-verbal conduct. *Early CA used everyday, mundane conversations and until recently the various forms of institutional interactions *In transcription: attention to details

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The reasons or major advantages of using recording in contrast to surveys, questionnaires or experimental methodology :

1) sociology is about human actions, recording can best show you how people 'did' actions and other methods like surveys and questionnaires are about what people say they did.

2) With tape-recorded conversation the analyst can hear it repeatedly and can study it again and again

3) It permits other researchers and the readers to have direct access to the data about which claims made and to look at the analysis to check and allows for unanticipated noticing by others. making analysis subject to detailed public scrutiny and helping to minimize the influence of personal preconceptions or analytical biases.

4) It provides a level of complexity can be recovered from recordings of actual conversation, recordings can open up a range of phenomena that no one can expect them to happen.

5) because the data are available in 'raw' form they can be reused in a variety of investigations and can be re-examined in the context of new findings.

6) It is contrasted to quantitative and experimentally produced data.

And why video-recording? The best way however is video recording because it provides a rich source data, not just talk but also the body and gaze and gesture

sociology is about human action:

what real people actually do.22

The main concepts & findings in CAtypes of or aspects interactional organization :

• Turn-taking organization• Organization of action/sequence organization• Preference organization• Repair• Topic• Story telling• Opening and closing in telephone calls

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Turn-taking • Turn-taking is a basic form of organization for conversation. • It means taking, holding and relinquishing speaking floor• It provides coherence and orderliness and it is the

requirement of any joint action• turn-taking system in conversation is “locally managed” (it

organizes current turn and the next turn) and “party-administered” (there is no referee to determine who should speak next) rather participants themselves work this out.

• Sacks’ “one party at a time” rule• turn-constructional units (TCU) • “transition-relevance place” (TRP)

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Adjacency pairs

• It is described in terms of five basic characteristics. An adjacency pair is: • (1) A sequence of two utterances, which are • (2) adjacent, • (3) produced by different speakers, • (4) ordered as a first part and second part, and • (5) typed, so that a first part requires a particular

second part (or range of second parts)

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Organization of action/sequence organization• This focuses on how actions are ordered in conversation• analysis involves attention to both: the actions being

accomplished by a turn and the practices of speaking which make the actions to happen through linguistic forms within some context.

• adjacency pairs is a basic form of action sequencing. We replace the strict criteria of adjacency pair with the notion of conditional relevance: the criterion for adjacency pair that given the first pair part the second is relevant and expectable. If the second fails to occur, it is noticeably absent and accountable. What binds the the parts of adjacency pair is not the formation of a rule that specify that a question must be answered but the expectation should be attended to.

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Rules which seem to govern the turn-taking process were identified (Sacks et al, 1974):

Rule 1(a) If the current speaker has identified, or selected, a particular next speaker, then that speaker should take a turn at that place.

Rule 1(b) If no such selection has been made, then any next speaker may (but need not) self-select at that point. If self-selection occurs, then first speaker has the right to the turn.

Rule 1(c) If no next speaker has been selected, then alternatively the current speaker may, but need not, continue talking with another turn constructional unit, unless another speaker has self-selected, in which case that speaker gains the right to the turn.

Rule 2 Whichever option has operated, then rules 1(a)–(c) come into play again for the next transition relevance place.

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The question is not answered but an account is offered.

  Though there is no immediate answer, but the response is relevant.

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CA’s notion of context • Schegloff (1992) and context:He has indicated that context can be considered in two different ways. Context may be external to the interaction itself; this includes context in the form of social categories, social relationships and institutional and cultural settings. The second is internal to the interaction and is created by participants through their talk.

CA think of 'context' as something endogenously generated within the talk of the participants and, indeed, as something created in and through that talk.

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CA vs other approaches

Differences between the methodology of linguistics and CA methodologyCa’s interest is in the social act and the interactional organization of social activity while linguistics is interested in language and the structure of language; in CA words used in talk are not studied as semantic units but as products or objects for negotiation of activity or action in the talk (Hutchby and Wooffitt) differences between conversation analysis and discourse analysisBoth approaches explains how coherence and sequential organization in discourse is produced and understood

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CA and DA1) In focus, CA’s focus is on processes involved in social interaction and

does not include written texts or larger sociocultural phenomena 2) In method• CA uses a bottom-up, emic, data-driven approach is perfectly capable of

portraying the interactional architecture ; DA the traditional top-down, etic, theory –driven method.

• CA is aimed at determining the methods and resources that the interactional participants use to produce interactional contributions and make sense of the contributions of others.

• DA uses the methodology, principles and concepts of linguistics and -it extends techniques in linguistics beyond the unit of sentence. The procedures employed are: 1) isolation of a set of categories or units of diocese and 2) formulation of rules to decide well-formed sequences of categories/coherent discourses from ill-formed sequences/incoherent discourse. And there is an appeal to intuitions. And Its two types: text grammarians and speech act theorists

• Conversation analysis is an empirical approach to the study of conversation avoids pre-identified categories; the method is instead inductive, the search is for recurring patterns and it does not use no intuitive judgments

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A critique of CACollecting data• The difficulty of recording data because of the noise present in the

context as well as getting permission for the recording. • transcription is time-consuming and tedious, mechanical and needs a

great deal of accuracy.• use of a very restricted data base, i.e. only recordings of naturally

occurring interactions. and no use of other sources such as participants personal background as the usual macro-sociological variables (age, gender), interviews, their comments and interpretation of data

• Transcription is a subjective processData analysis• the potential methodological risk of CA lies in the analyst's inferences

and presuppositions.• The analytic process is sensitive to misinterpretation and over-

interpretation • Aneclotalism which means a few well-chosen examples (Dorneiy,

2007)

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“We must see …that a conversation has a life of its own and makes demands of its own behalf. It is a little social system with its own boundary-maintaining tendencies; it is a little patch of commitment and loyalty with its own heroes and its own villains.”

(Goffman, 1957, p. 47)33