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.

This an assessment of the main themes and arguments of the book. Looking back at Brexit, what is most striking is the subsequent economic decline of the UK – a consequence of Leave demagogues diverting voters’ attention from economic risks. Brexit’s populism was a manifestation of the Europe-wide rise of identitarian politics, the normalisation of national populism and the drift toward authoritarianism. These trends went with viewing the world as a collection separate sovereign nation states. A national population was imagined as a homogeneous mass, potentially embodied in a single sovereign leader. Seeing nations as separated entities brings a focus on foreign others, exemplified in the Brexiters’ fixation on immigration into the UK. Demagoguery, bound up with ‘post-truth’ culture, is used as an explanatory concept throughout this book, but requires redefinition in the age of mass media, data collection and psychological profiling. The most important conclusion is that Brexitspeak, Brexit policies and Brexit attitudes in government constitute threats to representative democracy, foreshadowed in the referendum process and actions by post-Brexit governments.

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.