The Tasks and Methods of Conversation Analysis

• Published in: Jikken shakai shinrigaku kenkyū Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 148 - 159
• Main Author: KASHIMURA, SHIRO
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Japanese Group Dynamics Association 1996
• Subjects: conversation analysis; ethnography; ethnomethodology; investigative interview; methodology
• ISSN: 0387-7973; 1348-6276
• DOI: 10.2130/jjesp.36.148

“Conversation Amalysis” (CA) consists of various methods of distinguishing and formulating the natural“orderliness”of ongoing actual conversation, where the features of“orderliness”are member's products as well as resources available“in situ”for the conversants themselves. Included in this“orderliness”of natural conversations are such phenomena as; the conversational“turns”, the units for constructing turns, the interpretation of a turn by the following turns, the maintainance and management of“turn expansion”, the techniques and rules for allocating turns among conversants, the machanisms for controlling sequential organization of related turns (such as“adjacency pairs”), the institutionally characteristic“shapes”of turns and turn-sequences. The present paper tries to explicate the basic concepts of CA and its techniques by (1) examining its methodological foundation, (2) examining an instance of actual conversation, being taperecorded in the course of an ethnographical fieldwork, where the ethnographer-interviewer observably utilizes both everyday and professional techiniques for doing conversation. The paper concludes that by adopting CA approach the multicple layers of conversational meanings and techniques, everyday and institutional, are made available for rigorous technical analysis.