A significant part of our work as conversation analysts is to persuade different disciplinary communities of the insights from CA. Here, conversation analysts working within the broader domains of sociology, linguistics, psychology and communication, education, and health services discuss the ways in which our findings may be shaped for publication in journals particular to our own domains, and thereby engage with our wider disciplinary audiences. In the first instance, we situate CA with respect to its development in each of our disciplines and identify the core issues with which CA is engaging. We then examine some of the challenges in presenting CA to our disciplines. These include addressing the question that CA scholars often face from colleagues in those disciplines: ‘Why should this matter to us?’. We finally offer some practical guidance on writing CA for our particular audiences, including: how to manage the length constraints often imposed by journals, the issue of sampling size, and how to balance the demands of transcriptional detail as required by CA with those of clarity and legibility for those not accustomed to it. Such challenges can be highly creative – and worthwhile in showing how CA can enhance received theory in our own disciplines.

This chapter is written for conversation analysts and is methodological. It discusses, in a step-by-step fashion, how to code practices of action (e.g., particles, gaze orientation) and/or social actions (e.g., inviting, information seeking) for purposes of their statistical association in ways that respect conversation-analytic (CA) principles (e.g., the prioritization of social action, the importance of sequential position, order at all points, the relevance of codes to participants). As such, this chapter focuses on coding as part of engaging in basic CA and advancing its findings, for example as a tool of both discovery and proof (e.g., regarding action formation and sequential implicature). While not its main focus, this chapter should also be useful to analysts seeking to associate interactional variables with demographic, social-psychological, and/or institutional-outcome variables. The chapter’s advice is grounded in case studies of published CA research utilizing coding and statistics (e.g., those of Gail Jefferson, Charles Goodwin, and the present author). These case studies are elaborated by discussions of cautions when creating code categories, inter-rater reliability, the maintenance of a codebook, and the validity of statistical association itself. Both misperceptions and limitations of coding are addressed.

This chapter describes the process of building a collection, using the example of other-initiated repairs resolved by repetition. The phenomenon under investigation is shown in the following example: 1. A: you in the bathroom?2. B: huh?3. A: you in the bathroom? The focus of the chapter is more on the way in which the collection evolved and less on the analytic process. Lessons learned from building a collection as well as the strengths of this particular collection are discussed. The chapter also discusses the importance of linking linguistic phenomena, e.g. repetition, to social practices, e.g. other-initiated repair. It argues that tightly constrained collections can allow a clear demonstration of connections between linguistic forms and interactional practices. The chapter stresses how building a collection and conducting an analysis of it can be messy. The methodical process of setting a question, collecting just the right data to answer it, and discovering the answer, is the story we usually tell in our publications. This chapter instead tries to illuminate and illustrate just how rocky the path to completion can be.

This chapter provides for principles, guidance, and illustrations about the way multimodality is conceptualized and operationalized within Conversation Analysis. It discusses the foundations of CA multimodal studies and shows how multimodal analysis can be conducted, on the basis of several empirical exemplary cases. The introduction of this chapter focuses on the conceptualization and definition of multimodality, and their methodological consequences. The subsequent sections guide readers through empirical analyses of various phenomena that have progressively expanded multimodal analysis, beginning with apparently simple co-speech gestures, and showing how they actually involve the entire body, continuing with the temporality of multiactivity, the spatiality of mobile activities, and the materiality of multisensoriality. These phenomena constitute exemplary areas of study in which the body features in a crucial way, and in which the interplay of linguistic and embodied resources provide for the accountability and intersubjectivity of the ongoing action in interaction.

In the early years of its development, CA research focused on data from English to explicate various organizations of interaction. As the number of researchers working with languages other than English has steadily increased, a question has arisen as to how organizations of interaction and practices used in them compare and contrast across different languages and cultures. As a result, there is now a burgeoning body of CA research undertaking crosslinguistic/cross-cultural comparison of interactional practices. On the one hand, comparative CA research can attest to the robustness and possible universality of the generic organizations of interaction that have been described in CA research based on examination of a small number of languages/cultures. On the other hand, comparative research can demonstrate the diversity of methods and practices by which humans deal with common (and perhaps universal) interactional problems. In this chapter, we discuss research methods and analytic techniques used in comparative CA research to give the reader some tips about how to begin and carry out this type of research. We also consider some analytic difficulties/challenges associated with comparative research so that the reader becomes aware of conceptual caveats when conducting crosslinguistic/cross-cultural comparison of interactional practices.

All CA research starts from single-case analysis (SCA) so as not to lose participants’ orientations exhibited in the details of individual cases. However, SCA can itself be a publishable outcome of CA research. This chapter, first, illustrates how previous SCA research has extracted candidate interactional practices and procedures, whose elaboration is left to subsequent research, and/or has advanced challenging claims concerning various human and social scientific concepts (such as grammar and action), using the previously explicated practices and procedures as analytic tools. Then, it demonstrates how SCA proceeds, and argues that the strength of SCA lies in its capacity to dig deeply into all the details of each case. Exploring the depth of a single case and examining various cases of a phenomenon are alternative methods for increasing the groundedness of the claims being advanced. Finally, the chapter suggests the possibility of applying SCA to practical issues.

This chapter deals with the methodological procedures of a CA study by tracking the development of a collection of instances of a multimodal practice and its variants. We describe the development of a study of the use of the German formats darf/kann ich…? (‘may/can I…?’; Deppermann & Gubina, 2021). Requesters use this format to ask if they may/can perform some embodied action while already starting or even fully performing it before the requestee’s confirmation. We first describe the process of sampling candidate cases to create a collection allowing us to identify a certain practice. Second, we describe how we analyzed (i) the time course of embodied action and its relationship to participants’ talk, (ii) the relationship the linguistic turn format, the sequential position and the multimodal context of the turn, and (iii) the relationship between situated action formation, linguistic design, action types, and interactional properties of a practice. Finally, we stress the importance of applying various strategies of comparative analysis and analytic induction to a larger dataset. We also discuss attending to the multimodal formation of social action on the basis of video data and multimodal transcripts is crucial for our understanding and analysis of face-to-face interaction.

We explore the necessarily comparative nature of CA’s methodology. We focus less on cross-linguistic comparisons, comparisons between talk-in-interaction in different settings, and comparisons between speakers from diverse speech communities. Instead, we consider the micro ways in which analysts work comparatively, ways that generally go unnoticed in accounts of CA’s methodology but which underpin our approach in data sessions, to building collections of phenomena, and even our research strategies when exploring certain linguistic or interactional forms. We demonstrate what can be learned from comparisons to be found in data, for example between the different responses by different participants to the same observation or question, or between different speakers’ versions of events, or from the different forms used by speakers when referring to the ‘same’ thing but in different action environments. We highlight the significance of speakers’ production of different versions of the ‘same’ something in their self-corrections. Finally, we illustrate the utility of a research strategy in which comparisons are made between speakers’ use of a certain reference form at one point in an interaction and the form they use at other points in the same interaction. In short, we explore the methodological significance of endogenous comparisons in data.

In this chapter, I reflect on how to go about applying Conversation Analysis (hereafter CA). When applying CA, we are concerned with the management of social institutions in interaction. However, the applied nature of our work means going beyond description, using the theories, principles, and methods of CA to address or ‘solve’ professional/practical ‘problems’ with roots or bases in interaction. For example, addressing public-health challenges, such as how physicians can resist ‘pressure’ for unwarranted antibiotic prescriptions during consultations for respiratory illnesses; or solving difficult or sensitive organizational tasks, such as how best to ask callers about their backgrounds in the service of ethnic monitoring on a telephone helpline. Here, the analyst is guided by professional/practical ‘problems’ or concerns. In the absence of existing guidance, I propose six key methodological steps for applying CA. These steps characterize the different kinds of ‘backstage’ and ‘frontstage’ work that support our attempts to address such ‘problems,’ and to identify and share ‘solutions.’ Along the way I provide illustrative examples, both historical and contemporary. Finally, I highlight some of the ethical and moral dilemmas we might need to navigate in the service of such work.

Conversation-analytic (CA) research projects have begun to involve the collection of interaction data in laboratory settings, as opposed to field settings, not for the purpose of experimentation, but in order to systematically analyze interactional phenomena that are elusive, not in the sense of being rare (i.e., ‘seldom occurring’), but in the sense of not being reliably or validly detected by analysts in the field using relatively standard recording equipment. This chapter (1) describes two, CA, methodological mandates – ‘maintaining mundane realism’ and ‘capturing the entirety of settings’ features’ – and their tensions; (2) provides four examples of elusive phenomena that expose these tensions, including gaze orientation, blinking, phonetic features during overlapping talk, and inhaling; and (3) discusses analytic ramifications of elusive phenomena, and provides a resultant series of data collection recommendations for both field and lab settings.

Much CA research is grounded in specimen collections, which are numerically modest by the standards of survey research or corpus linguistics, but substantial relative to observational fieldwork. The appeal of collection-based methods is that they afford some of the advantages of context-sensitive case analysis, while also enabling the development of accounts whose generality may be tested across a number of cases. They have a particular utility for the investigation of novel phenomena in areas whose elementary units and basic organizational forms are not well-understood. This chapter reflects on key issues involved in both assembling and working through specimen collections. Regarding the assembly of cases, it is argued that researchers should cast a wide net across a diversity of data sources, taking care to avoid allowing hunches or hypotheses to gain a controlling influence over data collection. Regarding the investigation of patterns across cases, the discussion touches on the utility of single case analyses, systematic reviews of the entire collection, and various approaches to dealing with anomalous cases. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the limitations of prototypical specimen collections, identifying conditions when it may be advisable to augment a collection by adding cases beyond the target phenomenon.

Conversation Analysis usually involves collecting, organizing, and analyzing audiovisual data clips and transcripts. In this chapter, we provide guidance based on common CA research practices for making, naming, and organizing clips. We provide examples of both digital and analog tools and methods for preparing, manipulating, and reviewing transcripts and data throughout the analytic research cycle. Finally, we discuss common data management techniques for protecting participant privacy by masking voices, faces, and other identifiable features before sharing clips and transcripts e.g., during CA data sessions. This chapter aims to support CA researchers who have already collected and organized their field recordings, and are ready to start making, sharing, and analyzing collections of clips.

Field recordings are the data from which CA research proceeds. Keeping recordings well organized and accessible, securely backed up, and as reusable as possible is important for avoiding data loss, enabling collaboration, and ensuring future uses of the data. In this chapter, we outline some essential data management practices for backing up, encrypting, and sharing data. We explain how conversation analysts organize audiovisual files, transcripts, and metadata. We also help the reader to navigate the complexities of dealing with multiple recording sources, and for choosing digital file formats and codecs. This chapter aims to support CA researchers from the first moment of having recorded some interactional field data to the point of being ready to start doing detailed forms of analysis.

The study of epistemic issues in conversation focuses on the knowledge claims that interactants assert, contest, and defend in turns at talk and sequences of interaction. Epistemic issues permeate all the topics that conversation analysts study and are central to ‘recipient design’ – the ways in which speakers design their talk to accommodate the specifics of the context and the particular others who are their interlocutors. However, the study of epistemics is complicated by the fact that CA methodology permits the attribution of subjective knowledge to participants as a part of the analytic process only if the attribution is grounded in the data of interaction. While this stipulation has tended to inhibit research on epistemics in the past, the development of the notion of epistemic stance has enabled researchers to focus on how persons present themselves as more or less knowledgeable, and have those claims upheld or contested by others. This chapter identifies and illustrates seven sources of evidence that can be used, separately and in combination, to ground analytical claims about epistemic stance and status in conversational interaction. The analysis of epistemics is shown to have deep continuities with general conversation analytic procedures used across the field.