Conversation Analysis

Today, I read the chapter on conversation analysis in Grbich (2013), as well as Rapley’s section on conversation analysis (2008, pp. 72-87).  As far as I can tell this form of analysis is less sequential than others.  Coding is not even typical (Grbich).  As Rapley, notes:

You can focus on a single episode of talk to explore in detail how that specific moment of interaction happens. You notice something interesting, something that you think might be an ‘organized way of talking. You then go and look for other examples, in other settings, between different speakers to see if you can find other examples of this type of work.  In this way, you attempt to build a case that this organized way of talking is something that people do as part of their everyday lives . . . (p. 77)

However, as in all the forms of qualitative analysis, the devil is in a form of detail, and in conversation analysis it is attention to speech acts.  Further, the purpose of this form of analysis is the study of social interactions, even down to pauses and stressed words, and it is accompanied by a detailed system of notation (Grbich). 

When reading this I thought of the ethnography my group is reading on teenagers, and how the author likens their social relationships to the social dynamics of the caste system (Milner, 2004).  It appears the author builds upon some conversations in his study of teens.

Grbich, C. (2013). Qualitative data analysis: An introduction (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage.

Milner, M. (2004). Freaks, geeks, and cool kids: American teenagers, schools, and the culture of consumption. New York, NY: Routledge.

Rapley, T. (2007). Doing conversation discourse and document analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA:

Sage.