Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Qualitative Data Analysis I: Text Analysis 487
as students of conversation have learned, there is order in all that seeming
chaos as participants respond to each other (even in strong disagreements and
shouting matches) and take turns (Goodwin 1981:55ff). Conversation analysis
is the search for the grammar of ordinary discourse, or talk-in-interaction.
It is the study of how people take turns in ordinary discourse—who talks first
(and next, and next), who interrupts, who waits for a turn.
The rules of turn-taking are, like the rules of grammar that govern the formation
of sentences, known to native speakers of any language. But unlike the
other rules of grammar, the rules for taking turns are flexible, and allow turntaking
to be negotiated, on the fly, by participants in a conversation. At the
molecular level, then, every conversation is unique, but the study of many conversational
exchanges can expose the general rules, within and across cultures,
that govern how conversations start, evolve, and end.
Transcriptions
In order to identify turns and other features of conversations, you need
detailed records of actual talk-in-interaction. The tactic for signaling the intention
to take a turn or to repair a broken turn sequence may involve words or it
may involve prosodic features of speech (intonation, length of vowels, stress,
and so on), or even involve breaths, tokens (like er, ummm, eh), or gestures
or gazes. Coding schemes have been devised for marking all these different
features.
The system most widely used for transcribing speech was developed by
Gail Jefferson (1973; see Sacks et al. 1974; Psathas 1979; Atkinson and Heritage
1984; Psathas and Anderson 1990). Conventions for recording gestures
and gazes were developed by Charles Goodwin (1994). Table 17.1 provides
the common conventions for transcribing conversations.
Taking Turns
Harvey Sacks and his colleagues, Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson,
are widely credited for developing the systematic study of order in conversations
(Schegloff 1972; Jefferson 1973; Schegloff and Sacks 1973; Sacks et al.
1974). Among the basic rules they discovered are that the person who is
speaking may (but does not have to) identify the next speaker to take a turn
(Sacks et al. 1974). This is done with conversational devices—like ‘‘so what
do you think, Jack?’’—or with gazes or body language (Goodwin 1986, 1994).
If the person speaking does not select the next speaker, then any other person
in the conversation can self-select to take a turn.
Alternatively, the next speaker may jump in before a speaker has completed