Conversation Analysis

Conversation analysis (CA) is a sociological approach used to investigate the culturally methodic character of “talk-in-interaction,” which has had cross-disciplinary influence in linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Harvey Sacks, together with his colleagues Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, developed CA in a series of lectures in the 1960s (now collected in Sacks 1992). His aim was to develop a thoroughly naturalistic, empirical social science, that is, one that dealt with social events as they actually occurred—and not as captured in or portrayed by sociologically staged interviews, surveys, questionnaires, or documents (the traditional ways in which social science gets access to the social world).

The development of CA was, at least initially, strongly influenced by Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, the sociological study of the practical methods that members of society have to accomplish their everyday activities. Ethnomethodology drew on the work of Alfred Schutz who remarked that the social world that the sociologist encounters and tries to describe has already been described and interpreted by society's members. For ethnomethodology, the central question therefore was not: what are the best sociological methods to find out about the social world? But rather: how do members of society themselves find out about their world (in a practical, ordinary manner as part of their conduct of the society's everyday affairs)?

One of the challenges in the development of ethnomethodology was to access these “seen but unnoticed,” taken-for-granted “ethno-methods.” Sacks's way of dealing with this issue was to rely on (audio) recordings of talk-in-interaction. This allowed for the capture of verbal activities as they occur in real time, and, through repeated listenings, the possibility of studying the gathered materials in ever-closer detail—a feature that has been likened to the slow-motion instant replay of sports events. In that sense, CA is perhaps one of the few examples in social science where technological developments (the availability of cheap and portable tape recorders) led to methodological innovations.

CA researchers typically produce detailed transcripts of the materials that they are investigating. The transcription conventions of CA have been developed by Sacks's collaborator Gail Jefferson and are designed to strike a balance between capturing the way that participants actually talk (highlighting prolonged sounds, stressed syllables, or overlap between speakers) and overburdening the transcript with so much detail that it becomes unreadable. The purpose of transcribing is twofold. First, during the analysis, the very process of transcribing forces the researcher to pay detailed attention to the materials. Second, after the analysis has been written [Page 363]down, the inclusion of transcripts in reports allows readers to check whether what the researcher is saying about the materials is actually the case, thereby inviting readers to launch and document their own, alternative analysis. Technological developments (in particular, digitization of audio and visual materials) have lead to an increasing availability of sound, or even video, samples themselves.

Although CA started with a focus on conversation, this was simply a result of the fact that talk could be easily recorded, replayed repeatedly, transcribed, and made available to other researchers. In this sense, the name “conversation analysis” was misleading for Sacks's project since the interest was not in conversation per se, but rather in the culturally methodic character of social action and interaction, with conversation being only a convenient, but highly productive, case. The name “conversation analysis” was not then meant to designate a new sociological technique (to study conversation), but rather to point to a topic: the study of the conversational analyses employed by conversationalists themselves (i.e., their real-time understandings of “why that now?”).

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