Rapley2025
| Rapley2025 | |
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| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Rapley2025 |
| Author(s) | Tim Rapley |
| Title | Analysing conversation |
| Editor(s) | Clive Seale, Carol Rivas |
| Tag(s) | EMCA |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
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| Pages | 449-466 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4135/9781036233136.n28 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Researching Society and Culture |
| Chapter | 27 |
Abstract
In this chapter, you’ll explore how studying interactions in natural settings can reveal the intricate layers of social reality. Rooted in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis helps us understand how people navigate everyday situations, strategically using talk to accomplish social tasks and negotiate meaning within specific contexts.
Importantly, conversation analysis is based on what the participants do, on what they themselves are attending to within their talk as it is being done (or locally produced), and what outcomes they then achieve. It does not draw on prior assumptions of what you, the analyst, thinks should be going on, or on descriptions by people of what they have done.
Repeated study of recordings of interactions encourages great sensitivity to the nuances and patterns of talk. A detailed analysis is also aided by special transcription techniques that mark out subtle interactional features. Conversation analysts, if they have video data, also consider non-verbal cues like gaze direction, gestures, and bodily movements.
The chapter will show you step-by-step how such detailed analysis of audio and video recordings can reveal underlying social actions and practices embedded within seemingly mundane interactions. You’ll understand how speakers take turns in conversation, how their talk is influenced by prior turns at talk and then influences subsequent talk.
Language is designed to achieve certain actions and construct representations of reality. Institutional tasks and identities also shape the organisation of conversation. Talk is not just a trivial medium for social life. It is the means by which we experience, produce, and maintain our social life and our institutions.
Notes
