While interaction cannot provide direct evidence for claims about interactants’ expectations, understandings, and reasoning, conversation analysts offer indirect evidence to substantiate claims about interactants’ sense-making processes and activities. This chapter focuses on the kinds of evidence that may be used to substantiate such claims. The chapter discusses the evidence used to support four sense-making claims that Pomerantz made in published papers: (1) participants orient to disagreeing as problematic; (2) participants orient to self-praise as improper or wrong; (3) participants orient to experiencing a referent as a necessary condition for being able to offer one’s own assessment of the referent; and (4) recipients of a report of an inappropriate or unpleasant event may turn their attention to identifying the actions of a person thought to be responsible for the event. Pomerantz assesses whether the evidence she offered for each claim stands up to scrutiny. In addition to discussing the kinds of evidence that may be used to substantiate claims involving sense-making processes, Pomerantz demonstrates that sense-making work is an essential part of interactional practices, she advocates that sense-making processes be included in CA studies of interaction, and she discusses how to describe cognitive matters without making claims that cannot be substantiated.

Introduction

Patients not only describe their symptoms during medical visits, they frequently present possible explanations for those symptoms (Gill, 1995, 1998; Raevaara, 1998, 2000; Stivers, 2002; Gill et al., 2004; Gill and Maynard, 2006). Although patients often display uncertainty about their candidate explanations (Gill, 1998), they typically portray them as reasonable, and at least somewhat likely, possibilities. For this study, we analysed instances in which patients offered serious health conditions (a heart problem, appendicitis) as candidate explanations for symptoms and portrayed those candidate explanations as unlikely to be the case, as improbable, while also implicitly or explicitly directing the doctors to investigate and confirm that they were indeed improbable.

This study is part of a larger project of analysing the range of practices that patients use when they present medically serious conditions as candidate explanations. For this project, we examined a subset of those practices: those used on occasions in which a patient presented a serious health condition as an unlikely candidate explanation. We selected this phenomenon because we were intrigued by the following observations:

1. Patients did not simply raise the spectre of serious health conditions as candidate explanations; they spent considerable effort displaying sceptical stances toward those candidate explanations, often by presenting reports that served as evidence for the improbability of the candidate explanations. We wondered what potentially conflicting issues and constraints the displays of scepticism were designed to address and how the discourse was designed to deal with those issues and constraints.

2. […]

As conversation analysts, we analyze the sense-making practices that participants use to accomplish conversational actions, identities and roles. We study these practices by closely observing the details of the conduct of people in interaction as captured or rendered on videotape and/or audiotape recordings. For a number of reasons, many conversation analysts have been strongly reluctant to turn to the participants of an interaction as informants about aspects of the interaction. The reluctance is based on scepticism about a model of social action in which aspects of cognition are used to explain social action, the methods of eliciting self-reports of subjects' perceptions, the validity of such reports, and the temptation to privilege informants' accounts over, or even substitute them for, investigators' analyses of practices.

Through much of my professional career, the sole data I used for my analyses were audiotapes and videotapes of interaction. In some more recent studies, my collaborators and I used ethnographic data along with tape-recordings of interaction. We collected video stimulated comments as data, obtained by asking each of the participants of the interaction under investigation to view a videotape of the interaction and offer comments while viewing it. I will refer to the initial videotaped interaction as Event and the subsequent interaction in which an Event participant offered comments while viewing the videotape as Event.

The position that I am advocating is the following: the conversation analytic program of research is built on close analysis of interactional data, for example, audio and videotapes of interaction.

One use of in-depth interviews is to determine the respondents' attitudes, beliefs, and/or opinions on controversial issues. Race is one such controversial issue. When an interviewer asks questions about racial issues (or controversial issues more generally), a fundamental organization comes into play: (1) asking about a racial issue reflects and implicates a position or perspective with respect to the controversy; and (2) an interviewer can construct a query that aligns to a greater or lesser extent with a position or perspective, or he or she may work to avoid aligning with a particular position or perspective.

When an interviewer asks about a particular racial matter, the interviewee might presume that the interviewer endorses the perspective implicated by the query. Likewise, when an interviewee responds to a query about a particular racial matter, the interviewer might presume that the interviewee endorses a perspective implicated by the response. The possibility of the interactants' making inferences about each other's perspective presents certain problems for both the interviewer and interviewee in terms of how to formulate and interpret queries and responses.

Introduction

If a speaker performs an action that solicits a response, it may or may not succeed. Recipients may not hear the talk or understand it. They may ignore it and continue to be involved elsewhere or even initiate other actions. They may hear and understand the talk but withhold their responses. If a recipient does not give a coherent response, the speaker routinely sees the recipient's behavior as manifesting some problem and deals with it. He or she may abandon the attempt to get a response, may infer the recipient's response but let it remain unarticulated, or may pursue an articulated response.

This chapter examines some procedures through which speakers pursue responses to their assertions. If a speaker makes an assertion to a recipient who is knowledgeable on the matter, he or she may expect the recipient to confirm (or disconfirm) the assertion. The recipient may directly address the prior talk, for example, confirm, elaborate on, challenge, query, or disconfirm the assertion. On the other hand, he or she may look blank or questioning, or may make hesitating noises such as Uhs, Urns, and Wells. The data for the study consist of fragments of talk in which a speaker fails to get a coherent confirmation or disconfirmation from the recipient and pursues the matter further. If a recipient fails to give a coherent response, his or her behavior is accountable: The speaker makes sense of it in terms of the recipient having some problem in responding.