Elizabeth Stokoe

Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis

This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). Whilst the CA ‘juggernaut’ flourishes, the MCA ‘milk float’ is in danger of being run off the road. For MCA to survive either as a separate discipline, or within CA as a focus equivalent to other ‘generic orders of conversation’, I suggest it must generate new types of systematic studies and reveal fundamental categorial practices. With such a goal in mind, the second aim of the article is to provide a set of clear analytic steps and procedures for conducting MCA, which are grounded in basic categorial and sequential concerns. Third, the article aims to demonstrate how order can be found in the intuitively ‘messy’ discourse phenomenon of membership categories, and how to approach their analysis systematically as a robust feature of particular action-oriented environments. Through the exemplar analyses, the final aim of the article is to promote MCA as a method for interrogating culture, reality and society, without recourse to its reputed ‘wild and promiscuous’ analytic approach.

The Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM): A Method for Training Communication Skills as an Alternative to Simulated Role-play

The Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (CARM) is an approach to training based on conversation analytic evidence about the problems and roadblocks that can occur in institutional interaction. Traditional training often relies on role-played interaction, which differs systematically from the actual events it is meant to mimic and prepare for. In contrast, CARM uses animated audio and video recordings of real-time, actual encounters. CARM provides a unique framework for discussing and evaluating, in slow motion, actual talk as people do their jobs. It also provides an evidence base for making decisions about effective practice and communication policy in organizations. This article describes CARM’s distinctive practices and its impact on professional development across different organizations. Data are in British English.

Simulated Interaction and Communication Skills Training: The ‘Conversation-Analytic Role-Play Method’

‘Role-play’ is a ubiquitous method for training people in workplace settings of all kinds to better interact with other colleagues and members of the public. Van Hasselt, Romano and Vecchi define role-play as ‘simulations of real-world interpersonal encounters, communications, or events’ (2008, p. 251). Typically, role-play methods involve the people being trained or assessed interacting with actors or other simulated interlocutors, using ‘narrative adaptations’ of hypothetical or actual scenarios as the basis for the simulated encounter (Van Hasselt, Romano and Vecchi, 2008, p. 254, see also Rosenbaum and Ferguson, 2006). In addition to its training function, role-play is used to assess ‘communication skills’ across numerous workplace settings. It is also used more generally as a pedagogical tool in educational contexts (e.g., Andresen, 2005; Rogers and Evans, 2007), and to assess other sorts of psychological competences (e.g., Leising, Rehbein and Sporberg, 2007; Palmieri et al., 2007).

I'm not gonna hit a lady: Conversation analysis, membership categorization and men's denials of violence towards women

This article examines the way male suspects deny accusations of assaulting women in interrogations by police officers. It draws on a large corpus of British police interrogation materials, and uses conversation analysis to shed light on the location and design of, and responses to, suspects’ ‘category-based denials’ that they are not ‘the kind of men who hit women’. Two sections of analysis identify how, first, such denials routinely follow police officers’ direct questions about violent behaviour, and, second, how they become embedded in extended narratives that are not directly describing violence. In contrast to other discourse-analytic studies of men’s accounts of violence towards women, the article unpacks the component features that comprise what others might label grossly as the ‘discourse of gendered violence’. Rather than see how such ‘discourses’ operate in interview contexts, it shows how suspects construct, in a high-stakes setting for a particular purpose, different categories of men, claiming membership in one (who do not hit women) by recruiting the notion of the other (who do). Thus, in addition to its contribution to the study of gender and violence, the article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization and conversation analysis, showcasing a type of systematic sequential analysis that can be done with membership categories.

The (in)authenticity of simulated talk: comparing role-played and actual interaction and the implications for communication training

How authentic is simulated, or role-played, interaction, of the kind produced in communication training contexts? The article addresses this question by comparing actual and role-played police investigative interviews. Both types of interviews were recorded by the police: real ones to fulfill British legal requirements and training ones to maximize the authenticity of the training experience. Interview openings were examined using conversation analysis. Officers must adhere to Police and Criminal Evidence Act (2008) guidelines, turning them into spoken actions. The analyses revealed that while, in gross terms, officers in real and simulated interviews opened interviews by formulating the same actions (e.g., identifying copresent parties), differences were observable in their design and organization. In simulations, actions were more elaborate or exaggerated; that is, they were made interactionally visible and “assessable.” Furthermore, some actions were only present in simulations. Implications for the efficacy of role-play methods for training and assessing communication are discussed.

Discursive psychology, focus group interviews and participants' categories

We welcome this opportunity to discuss the application of discourse analytical approaches to the concerns of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology and its readership. Our remarks are directed (by editorial invitation) at one specific article (Korobov & Bamberg, 2004), but are designed to have a more general relevance to the relationships between data and analysis in discursive psychology (DP). It is important at this point, before critically engaging with the article, to emphasize that we endorse and encourage the kind of work that it represents. We aim to use this discussion as a basis for general remarks on how to apply DP to everyday language and social interaction, including interactions with children and adolescents, and to raise some problems with the use of interview and focus group materials. We examine in turn: (1) the article’s overall framework of theory and method, and (2) the nature of the data (focus group discussions) and its analysis in terms of ‘maturity’. Discursive developmental psychology, to the extent that such an enterprise has already begun, is not the study of how child discourse develops. It might overlap with that, but it has a much wider remit. Any study of mental life, or of the psychological characteristics of persons, has to be based on public materials and procedures, whether those of the psychological laboratory or of everyday life. This applies as much to the contents of consciousness as to the workings of memory, moral reasoning or gendered identities. In DP, however, this is not conceived as a matter of making private things public, nor internal events externally available. Rather, we approach the assumption of an inner–outer relationship (e.g. between thought and word) in an inverted manner. We begin with discourse practices – with observable, recordable, collections of everyday talk – and examine the ways in which psychological matters including thoughts, beliefs and attitudes, are topicalized, handled or implied, in that talk. It is not an attempt to deny the existence of thoughts and feelings. Rather, it is an approach to language and social interaction that refuses to treat talk as the overt expression or manifestation of a life within. 1 The nature and workings of a ‘life within’ are the kinds of

Doing actions with identity categories: complaints and denials in neighbor disputes

Abstract This paper examines the way making complaints about the neighbors and denying responsibility for disputes systematically bring into play categorizations of those involved. It draws on a corpus of British conversational materials including telephone calls to neighbor mediation centers and police interrogations of suspects. The analytic approach was conversation analytic: sequences of talk in which membership categories (e.g., “old man,” “kids”) and category-implicative descriptions (e.g., “shes eighty three,” “Mums elderly”) appeared were analyzed for their sequential placement, design, and action orientation. Two sections of analysis examine the use of categories in (i) formulating and affiliating with complaints, and (ii) denying alleged complainables. The paper presents a challenge to those who argue that “identity” topics are not systematically “capturable” outside of research interviews or as regularly occurring phenomena of talk-in-interaction, by showing how the same categories and categorial descriptions crop up in the same conversational turns, accomplishing the same social action.

Broadcasting the royal role: Constructing culturally situated identities in the Princess Diana Panorama interview

We examine critically the two traditions of work that have informed discursive approaches to identity: social constructionism and conversation analysis. Within both strands, identity is theorized as a flexible phenomenon that is situated in conversations. But although constructionists locate identity within the social, such work remains at a theoretical and rather abstract level and often fails to interrogate the discursive practices through which identity is constituted. Conversely, this attention to the occasioning of identity in everyday talk is precisely the focus of the second, conversation analytic strand of work. Whereas constructionists attend to the wider cultural positioning of identities, conversation analysts resist commenting upon the social significance of what is constructed in interaction. Conversation analysis is therefore limited by its restricted notion of culture in the study of the situated social self. Despite the apparent conflict between these approaches, we suggest that a synthesis of the two provides a comprehensive framework for analysing identity. Drawing upon the BBC Panorama interview between Martin Bashir and Princess Diana, we explore how culturally situated identities are located in this conversational context. We conclude that analysts must not only attend to the micro-level organization of identities but also engage in a wider understanding of the cultural framework within which they are located.

Gender, language, conversation analysis and feminism

tives in mind. First, we wanted to collect together, for the first time, conversation analytic studies of gender and language. Our aim was to lend coherence to a previously disparate but distinct strand of language and gender theorizing. Related to this, we wanted to revisit the language and gender arena from an explicitly conversation analytic (CA) perspective, asking what it can contribute to the field. Finally, we wanted to provide a forum for debating the issues that emerge from the integration of feminism, CA and ethnomethodology (EM) so that the academic community can engage with, and see the potential of, feminist conversation analytic work. In this editorial, we set out the thematic and theoretical landscape within which the special issue is located. The field of language and gender continues to stimulate discussion across the social sciences. A shift has occurred in recent years, from early attempts to define gendered speech styles to an approach that draws upon constructionist and performative treatments of gender (cf. Bucholtz et al., 1999; Weatherall, 2002). Somewhat obscured within this literature is a smaller body of work that uses CA/EM to explore how gender ‘creeps’ into talk (Hopper and LeBaron, 1998). LeBaron (cited in Tracy, 1998) neatly summarizes the conversation analytic approach to language and gender and contrasts it with traditional studies:

Gender and discourse, gender and categorization: current developments in language and gender research

In this paper, I review recent developments in the study of language and gender. During the past decade, many researchers have abandoned a ‘gender differences’ agenda in pursuit of constructionist and, increasingly, ethnomethodological analyses of genders production, performance and occasioning in discourse. I consider these developments in the light of other recent work that focuses on and analyses gender categories and their sequential trajectories in talk, using Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks, 1992). I argue that the ‘doing’ of gender in our society is constituted in peoples situated and reflexively organized categorization practices, and that these practices are fruitfully explored using this explicitly articulated machinery for understanding how the gender order is constituted as an ongoing reality.