Readings Sept. 19

Hutchby, I. & Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversation analysis, 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. 

Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an Introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.) Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13- 23). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Wiggins, S., Potter, J. & Wildsmith, A. (2001). Eating your words: Discursive psychology and the reconstruction of eating practices. Journal of Health Psychology 6(5), 5-15. 

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Summary of the first 3 chapters of Hutchby and Woofitt’s book.

Chapter	Summary	Of Note
1: What is Conversation Analysis?	·  Major names: Harvey Sacks (founder of CA), Gail Jefferson (Jeffersonian transcription), Schegloff ·  CA uses naturally occurring talk, specifically focusing on talk-in-interaction, and believes talk is structured, organized action. ·  Tools: next-turn proof procedure, membership categories, word choice for fact building ·  Ties to ethnomethodology (Garfinkel)- how people account for their own and others’ actions.	I’m starting to understand (after reading the section on ethnomethodology) why DP researchers include DP, DA, CA, and ethnomethodology in descriptions of their studies. Each piece is important to DP, but they are all distinct ways of doing research.
2: Conversational Structures: The Foundations of Conversation Analysis	1)   Sequential order a)    Turns are taken serially, but also are linked together. 2)   Inferential order a)    People rely on their interpretation to know what kind of turn is occurring 3)   Temporal order a)    Turn construction units occur in time. 4)   All 3 orders interact during talk a)    4 key analytic factors to illustrate that interaction i)     Adjacency and Preference Structures ii)    Turn-taking (1) Turn-construction (a) Projectability (b) Transition-relevance Place (2) Turn-distribution iii)  Overlapping Talk iv)  Repair and Correction	This chapter was straightforward. It is good to know that “most instances of overlap occur in an environment of possible transition-relevance places” (p. 54), because I am an overlapper! I thought I was just not paying attention, but maybe I was projecting the completion the end of a turn-construction unit.
3: Data and Transcription	· Data are the audio or video files not the transcription. · Transcription is part of the analysis process. o Transcribe turn-taking and the texture of the utterances (prosody, pauses, laughter, breath intakes) ·  Transcripts are impressionistic- they are what the transcriber heard and wrote.	It sounds as if CA researchers transcribe all their data using some form of Jeffersonian, because “any sound may have interactional import” (p.72).

            Hutchby and Woofit’s book has been helpful. It feels like a few missing pieces are starting to fall into place. Conversation analysis is the how of DP. The structure of using naturally occurring talk, looking at how people use talk and text, and the importance of listening repeatedly to the data in DP work all came from or are supported by CA. I think that I will be ready, when the time comes, to collect, transcribe, analyze, and report my data for my dissertation. (Also, I’ve added Sack’s lectures to my to-read list.)

            Jefferson’s article compared ways to report and analyze data using varying depths of transcription. She has a no-nonsense, no apologies way of approaching her work. For example, when she asks herself what good is transcribing to such detail, she replies“…it seems to me that one cannot know what one will find until one finds it…” (p. 15). She includes the work that laughter can do to enhance a declination or mask words possibly “on purpose.” She also illustrated how the same word can be enunciated or spoken with dialect depending on the work the word is doing. She concluded with the idea to look at the little things to find undiscovered ways of orderliness.

            Wiggins, Potter, and Wildsmith’s article is about how families with teenage daughters talk about eating (the actual food, hunger, and restraint from eating too much). They used naturally occurring talk and provided excerpts of one family’s conversations as examples of the patterns they heard. Analysis of each issue (how the family constructs the object, individual, and behavior) was given after the excerpts. I wrote about this article for the DP class this summer. I still find this article to be well written and organized. It is a great empirical example that helps to understand DP/CA.