Applied Conversation Analysis
Charles Antaki (Loughborough University) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9473-4413)
To cite: Antaki, Charles. (2023). Applied Conversation Analysis. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI:
Where "basic" or "fundamental" CA discovers the conversational practices by which people bring off their everyday business, "applied" conversation analysis makes use of those discoveries in the analysis of some specific domain. It does so in a range of ways, from explication to intervention.
The explication of routine institutional work is probably the most current sense of "Applied CA". To give a sense of it, imagine that one knows, from basic CA work, that certain types of question formats prefer certain classes of response; with this, the applied CA researcher can look to see how, for example, a medical practitioner or a help-line call-taker may choose among question types in order to direct the interaction towards their goals for the session. This kind of ambition has generated a very large volume of work, beginning very early in CA's history, with analyses of the work of the courtroom, the classroom, the doctor's clinic, and the news interview (see, for example, the influential collection Talk at Work (Drew & Heritage 1992). Since those early years, the range of institutions and their practices has expanded enormously, to encompass settings as diverse as the operating theatre and the cheese shop (Mondada 2014 and 2018, respectively), the classroom (Mori 2021) and the aircraft cockpit (Nevile 2004). It is probably true to say that when people think of applied CA, they think of this kind of CA -- its being used to explicate what people do when they are in a setting which provides for the delivery of a service or the performance of an institutional task.
But CA can also engage more directly with institutions, social problems, or even schools of thought, to intervene and make changes. Antaki (2011a, 2011b) catalogues a number of ways in which this has been done.
A scholarly way to "apply CA" is to actively try to respecify an intellectual field of study by persuading its adherents to change their ways methodologically and, more grandly, epistemologically. Aiming to change sociology was of course a central project of Sacks and other founders to change sociology; for psychology, the discursive psychologists Edwards and Potter campaigned to respecify the phenomena of psychology in interactional terms (see their manifesto (Edwards & Potter 1992). Perhaps the most current active work is done by CA scholars with their sights on certain areas of linguistics, especially syntax (e.g., Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2001, 2018; Keevallik 2018).
A growing trend in applied CA is to rework the perspective on a societal issue. This might be at the macro- or micro- level. In the former, we might pick out those who use CA to illuminate the everyday exercise of power in society: early examples would be Kitzinger's broader feminist project (Kitzinger 2000, 2008) and Rawls' engagement with anti-racism (2000; Rawls & Duck 2020). At a more micro- level , there is the use of CA to challenge the picture of disorder and deficiency in atypical populations - in, for example, the communication of people with aphasia (since Goodwin 1995), autism (for a recent bold statement, see Maynard & Turowetz 2022), people living with deaf-blindness (Goode 2010), people with dementia (for an early view, see Perkins, et al., 1998) or learning disability (Williams 2011).
The greatest challenge for the CA researcher is to change the workings of an institution -- usually, by designing an intervention to train public-facing staff to better interact with clients or customers. There are excellent examples of successful interventions in various aspects of medical care, where the ambition is to practitioners and patients (for example, Parry, et al.'s "Real Talk" training programme for end-of-life care; see Parry, et al. 2022). In speech and language therapy, CA research on the interactional construction of meaning, inspired by the work of Goodwin on aphasia, has resulted in a series of successful interventions in the work of speech and language therapists with the clients and their clients conversational partners (Wilkinson 2014; and see O'Brien, et al. 2018 for a description of a training programme). Since the aim is to actually bring about change, there is an unusual ethical issue involved in these projects, not encountered even in other applications of CA: that is, for whose benefit the change is being made. Typically, such intervention by CA workers has been in the service of the medical establishment, on the principle that this will also benefit patients; for example, the well-known experiment to improve patients’ disclosure by asking them if they had “some” versus “any” problems (Robinson & Heritage 2014) would make consultations more efficient for the doctor, and involve less trips back-and-forth for the patient. But as the application of CA moves into partnership with commercial organisations, the balance of benefits may become more blurred.
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Cited References:
Antaki, C. (Ed.). (2011). Applied Conversation Analysis: Intervention and Change in Institutional Talk. Springer.
Antaki, C. (2011). Six kinds of applied conversation analysis. In C. Antaki (Ed.), Applied Conversation Analysis: Intervention and Change in Institutional Talk (pp. 1-14). Palgrave Macmillan.
Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2001). Introducing interactional linguistics. In M. Selting & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), Studies in Interactional Linguistics (pp. 1-22). John Benjamins.
Drew, P., & Heritage, J (1992). Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge University Press
Edwards, D., & Potter, J. (1992). Discursive Psychology. Sage.
Goode, D. (2010). A World without Words: The Social Construction of Children Born Deaf and Blind. Temple University Press.
Goodwin, C. (1995). Co-constructing meaning in conversations with an aphasic man. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 28, 233-260.
Keevallik, L. (2018). What does embodied interaction tell us about grammar?. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(1), 1-21.
Kitzinger, C. (2000). Doing feminist conversation analysis. Feminism and Psychology, 10(2), 163–193.
Kitzinger, C. (2008). Developing feminist conversation analysis: A response to Wowk. Human Studies, 31(2), 179-208.
Maynard, D. W., & Turowetz, J. (2022). Autistic Intelligence. University of Chicago Press.
Mondada, L. (2014). The Surgeon as a Camera Director: Manoeuvring Video in the Operating Theatre. In M. Broth, E. Laurier, & L. Mondada (Eds.), Studies of Video Practices (pp. 105-140). Routledge.
Mondada, L. (2018). The multimodal interactional organization of tasting: Practices of tasting cheese in gourmet shops. Discourse Studies, 20(6), 743-769.
Nevile, M. (2004). Beyond the Black Box: Talk-in-interaction in the Airline Cockpit. Ashgate.
O’Brien, R., Goldberg, S. E., Pilnick, A., Beeke, S., Schneider, J., Sartain, K., Thomson, L., Murray, M., Baxendale, B., & Harwood, R. H. (2018). The VOICE study–A before and after study of a dementia communication skills training course. PloS one, 13(6), e0198567
Parry, R., Whittaker, B., Pino, M., Jenkins, L., Worthington, E., & Faull, C. (2022). RealTalk evidence-based communication training resources: development of conversation analysis-based materials to support training in end-of-life-related health and social care conversations. BMC Medical Education, 22(1), 1-9.
Perkins, L., Whitworth, A., & Lesser, R. (1998). Conversing in dementia: A conversation analytic approach. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 11(1-2), 33-53.
Rawls, A. W. (2000). “Race” as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: WEB Du Bois's “Double Consciousness” Thesis Revisited. Sociological Theory, 18(2), 241-274.
Rawls, A. W., & Duck, W. (2020). Tacit Racism. University of Chicago Press.
Robinson, J. D., & Heritage, J. (2014). Intervening with conversation analysis: The case of medicine. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(3), 201-218.
Schwabe, M., Howell, S. J., & Reuber, M. (2007) Differential diagnosis of seizure disorders: A conversation analytic approach. Social Science & Medicine, 65, 712–724
Williams, V. (2011). Disability and Discourse: Analysing Inclusive Conversation with People with Intellectual Disabilities. John Wiley & Sons.
Wilkinson, R. (2014). Intervening with conversation analysis in speech and language therapy: Improving aphasic conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(3), 219-238.
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