Conversation analysis

Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. As its name implies, CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media. As a consequence, the term 'conversation analysis' has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of social interactions.

Inspired by Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman's conception of the interaction order, CA was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s principally by the sociologist Harvey Sacks and his close associates Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Today CA is an established method used in sociology, anthropology, linguistics, speech-communication and psychology. It is particularly influential in interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and discursive psychology.

As in all research, conversational analysis begins by setting up a research problem. The data collected for CA is in the form of video or audio recorded conversations. The data is collected with or without researchers' involvement, often simply by adding a video camera to the room where the conversation takes place (e.g. medical doctors consultation with a patient). From the audio or video recording the researchers construct a detailed transcription (ideally with no details left out). After transcription, the researchers perform inductive data-driven analysis aiming to find recurring patterns of interaction. Based on the analysis, the researchers develop a rule or model to explain the occurrence of the patterns.

In the absence of formal agendas, the set of practices through which turns are allocated in conversation has been the subject of study in its own right. The Turn-taking model for conversation was arrived at inductively through empirical investigation of field recordings of conversations and fitted to the observationally derived facts as that in conversation, participants are constrained to issue their utterances in allocated turns, and enlist various mechanisms to obtain them. Initial interest was in very simple forms that take place in two-party conversations where sentence completion, or pause, might be enough to allocate the next turn to the co-present party in the manner that has been discussed under the rubric of 'adjacency pairs'.

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