Conversation Analysis and Qualitative Interviewing: Exercises in Topic and Resource
| Panel: | P47 - Interview research as the meeting point between CA and narrative analysis |
| Author: | Manzo, John |
| Abstract: | |
| Conversation Analysis (CA), as a sociological study of the organization of conversation and related/embedded social interaction, has traditionally addressed, and used as data, transcripts of naturally occurring social encounters. Many of these are "casual" in nature, many are institutional, and some even entail settings in which one participant has a script (as with studies of survey interviews). But the vast majority of recent studies in qualitative sociology have used qualitative interviewing, not recording of naturally occurring social interaction, as a method of data collection. This paper brings this data-gathering approach to problem focus and makes it a topic of analysis (and not a resource to facilitate larger findings) by examining data derived from various ethnographic interviews in which the author interviewed research subjects. The paper comprises three insights, supported with data displays, concerning the value of CA for analyzing qualitative interviews. First, CA recommends techniques for data reduction and presentation that are very rarely undertaken in qualitative sociology and allow not only CA per se deploying these data, but also provide for more sound analytic claims outside of those germane to CA. Second, CA provides a means to validate claims that the findings made in qualitative studies reflect, as a factual matter, the experiences of the persons under study by considering the roles that interviewers' utterances play and to focus, in general, on conversational sequencing and the discursive contexts of interviewees' turns of talk. As such, CA provides a new way to analyze interviews, to determine the extent to which findings represent the outcomes of interactional co-construction by interviewer and interviewee. Third, bringing CA to interview data facilitates a "sociology of sociology" that attends to interactional construction and reification as CA practitioners have done with respect to the "knowledge" gleaned at the site of survey interviews. This study proposes that CA can provide insights for qualitative sociology similar to, and as valuable as, those that have been uncovered by CA for quantitative sociologists in survey labs. |
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