Conversation Analysis

Early Development

Harvey Sacks initiated the idea of CA while a graduate student with Emanuel Schegloff and David Sudnow in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. All three were students of Erving Goffman, who was developing his personal approach to examining the everyday social activities of individuals in an attempt to describe what he called the interaction order. Sacks and Schegloff were seeking to develop a new way, independent of then current sociological methods, for conceptualizing and approaching social activity. In so doing, they avoided the reliance on commonly employed sociological [Page 196]concepts (e.g., culture, norms, organizations, or states) to provide means of describing and explaining data. Rather, they sought an approach rooted in the observable displays of what individuals do during interaction to make their understandings of the activity in which they were involved known to participants.

Sacks became a fellow at the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center in 1963. As part of the procedure of handling incoming helpline phone calls, the center routinely made audio recordings of these calls. These materials provided a set of naturally occurring data that Sacks could examine. While Sacks was not initially interested in studying conversation, the recorded phone calls provided a means to analytically investigate social action as undertaken via the interaction of caller and counselor. The recent developments of recording technology provided the ability to capture natural instances of human conduct without the direct intervention of the researcher to filter observations, such as through note taking. This noninterference of the analyst became one of the assumptions of CA data collection.

Even though the initial set of recordings was produced in an institutional setting (the Suicide Prevention Center), the focus was on the observable elements of conversation practice generally rather than on any situated features of the interaction. While these recordings provided the initial corpus from which Sacks drew his material as he developed his lectures on CA, the data set quickly grew to include instances of conversation that were not institutionally connected. These data allowed for the development of arguments regarding the general use of conversational devices (such as turn taking and sequential organization) across situations rather than in one particular institutional setting. As a faculty member, Sacks attracted several students, such as Gail Jefferson, Anita Pomerantz, and Jim Schenkein, among others, with whom (in addition to Schegloff) he would develop initial concepts of conversational practice and who would be among those carrying on Sacks's research tradition following his early death in a traffic accident in 1975.

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