Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology: Understanding Social Interaction
Classified in Psychology and Sociology
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Conversation Analysis
An approach to studying social interaction, encompassing verbal and non-verbal conduct in everyday life.
Seeks to uncover how members of a society create a sense of social order.
CA posits that the meaning of an action derives from its placement within a series of actions. For example, "I did it too" only makes sense in context.
It establishes its own assumptions, methodology, and theoretical framework.
Its primary concerns are the organization of knowledge, social order, sense-making, social rules, and structures within interactions.
Ethnomethodology
A sociological perspective focusing on how people interpret their everyday world.
"Analysis of ways of doing and knowing".
Its central focus is connecting knowledge, action, and context.
It examines how social action reveals, produces, and reproduces knowledge, social circumstances, and conducts.
Some Findings of Conversation Analysis
Basic Structure of Interaction:
Adjacency Pairs: A two-part exchange where the second utterance depends functionally on the first. These utterance pairs exhibit stable patterns, recurring actions, and ordered interactions. They provide a framework for actions, an environment for inferences, and expectations of forms and meanings. Adjacency pairs highlight the local nature of conversational structure and contribute to building intersubjectivity.
Turn-Taking: An organizational structure where participants speak one at a time in alternating turns. "A basic set of rules governs turn construction, allocating the next turn to one party and coordinating transfer to minimize gaps and overlaps." These rules are managed locally.
From Conversation Analysis to Discourse Analysis
Conversation Analysis examines how participants develop systematic solutions to recurring organizational challenges in conversation. Participants solve these problems using their knowledge of ordinary issues. This knowledge reveals and produces a sense of order and normalcy in everyday conduct.
Tools for Analysis
The tools comprise questions to ask and areas to consider when analyzing conduct from recordings and transcriptions.
Analyzing a practice involves describing the knowledge participants employ, as well as when and how they use it.