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.

This chapter provides an overview of foundational principles that guide CA research, offered both on the basis of our own experiences as researchers, and from our discussions with other conversation analysts as they authored contributions for the present volume. We begin by briefly sketching of some of the fundamentals of human social interaction, in order to underscore CA’s central focus, the study of social action, and describe some of the basic features of how interaction is procedurally organized. These basic features of interaction, which CA research has rigorously evidenced and which guide our examination of new data, are then shown directly to inform CA as a research methodology. Put another way, it is precisely due to the procedural infrastructure of action in interaction that conversation analysts use and work with interactional data in particular ways. We conclude with advice for readers as they continue to explore the volume’s contents.

Conversations involving people with communication disorders or other forms of communicative impairment, such as those with dementia, autism, aphasia, or hearing impairment, differ in systematic ways from typical conversations (i.e., those involving participants without significant communicative or cognitive challenges). Drawing from CA work over the last few decades, this chapter discusses methodological issues involved in data collection in this field and in the transcription and analysis of these types of data. Analysis of the ways in which these interactions are distinctive and ‘atypical’ as regards social actions and the practices used in their construction and deployment involves a form of comparative analysis drawing on CA findings concerning typical interaction. The chapter also discusses other, more explicit, forms of comparative analysis regularly undertaken in this field, including comparison of participants’ conversations over time, and the comparison of how conversations involving participants with one type of communicative impairment compare with those of participants with a different form of impairment. One way in which the latter type of investigation can be developed is discussed in relation to a certain interactional feature – here, interruptive, other-initiation of repair – and how it may be traced across conversations involving participants with different communicative impairments.

Many conversation-analytic projects and published papers have their origins in phenomena discovered by those working together in data sessions. Many researchers encounter conversation analysis and learn its principles in such sessions. For those working where conversation analysis is taught, data sessions are a regular and indispensable part of the working week, part of the practice of conversation analysis itself, and a primary resource through which methods are taught and communities are built. They provide occasions at any point in the research cycle to examine data fragments together in a concentrated stretch of time. They present opportunities for novice and experienced researchers to appraise existing research findings and to learn from each other in the heuristics of making observations and developing arguments from those observations. Included in this chapter are practical suggestions for planning, leading, and participating in data sessions, and a set of ‘keys’ to different aspects of turn and sequence organization that can open up areas of analysis in a particular stretch of interaction. The chapter also highlights challenges regularly encountered, especially when working with different languages and when meeting remotely, and it outlines recent developments, such as new formats and technologies for enhancing in-person and remote data sessions.

Social interaction is inescapably multimodal, composed of talk (e.g., lexical items, syntax, prosody), nonlexical conduct (e.g., breathing, laughter, sighing, response cries), and solely visible (or embodied) conduct (e.g., body posture and movement, hand gestures, object manipulation). While this chapter concerns the transcription of social interaction, its primary goal is not to explain transcription conventions and instruct readers how to use them (these topics are dealt with secondarily). Rather, the primary goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the analytic necessity and usefulness of systematic and detailed transcription practices, including those for both vocal and visual conduct (e.g., systems developed by Gail Jefferson and Lorenza Mondada, respectively). We achieve this goal by applying a wide range of transcription practices to a single video clip of mundane, dinner-time English conversation, illustrating how transcription both is, and contributes to, an analytic process. We discuss practical difficulties associated with transcription, especially that of visual conduct. Ultimately, we show that transcription is essential to understanding topics such as turn-taking, sequentiality, (dis)affiliation, emotion, stance, and social action itself.

Limited communicative resources due to dementia-related memory problems can be consequential for opportunities to claim epistemic rights and initiate and pursue communicative projects for persons living with dementia. This conversation analytic case study of a video-recorded homecare visit between Koki and his homecare nurse focuses on an extended negotiation concerning a factual disagreement related to a practical problem. The study explores how Koki manages to mobilize remaining communicative resources for initiating and pursuing a topical agenda, as well as how the caregiver recognizes and supports these initiatives. The analysis describes how a person with dementia manages to influence the course of action and, in collaboration with the interlocutor, succeeds in achieving two interrelated projects, one being within an epistemic domain and the other within a deontic domain. Koki’s persistent use of first actions, with repeated and upgraded knowledge claims, as well as embodied and verbal displays of a practical problem, contributes to influencing both the topical agenda and action agenda. The analysis shows how an attentive interlocutor may collaborate in identifying a practical problem and finding a solution to it, and thereby assist the person with dementia in taking control over his everyday life despite limited communicative resources.

In this introductory chapter, we provide a brief overview of some of the main topics related to dementia communication research that are addressed by the different chapters in this edited volume: Dementia and Diagnostics, Dementia and Conversational Strategies, Dementia and Epistemics, and Communicative Challenges in Everyday Social Life. One of the central aims of this volume is to shed more light on how persons with dementia accomplish relevant goals in interaction and also how changes in an individual’s discursive abilities may impact how conversationalists negotiate a world in common and continue to build their social relationships. All contributions for this edited volume draw on the methods of Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach to social interaction that provides a detailed view of the moment-by-moment accomplishment of social life. By exploring interactional practices through the lens of CA, this volume seeks to explore interactions involving people with dementia in a variety of contexts (everyday and institutional), pointing to both the interactional difficulties that often arise, but also the creativity and collaboration within these interactional encounters. A summary of each of the volume’s chapters is also provided.

This chapter analyzes the discursive functions of a single interactional practice – the use of the phrase “now what” – that is recurrently employed by an individual diagnosed with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; pseudonym Robert). Robert’s use of “now what” recruits assistance from interlocutors when a wider array of recruitment resources may not be readily available. I show how this practice calls on collaborators to articulate the next step of a task-based activity for which Robert requires guidance. I also examine how Robert employs “now what” over the course of a year. Over time, Robert begins to employ “now what” to navigate non-task-based activities, such as when being reprimanded, showing how he extends its use as he faces new interactional challenges. Some research examines "dementia interactions" through a lens of deficit; other research emphasizes skillfulness. I show how “now what” illuminates both the troubles Robert faces while simultaneously demonstrating his resourcefulness to navigate such troubles. I argue that such "compensatory" practices point to both deficit and skill, and suggest that a dichotomous framework – identifying a practice or behavior as either only a deficit or a skill – is unlikely to adequately capture the social engagement of those diagnosed with neurological disorders.

This chapter explores how differing expectations and experiences manifest in diagnostic interactions in the memory clinic. We do this by microanalysing communication in dementia diagnosis feedback meetings, focusing on instances of misalignment between doctors and the person living with dementia. We examine three videos from a dataset of 101 recordings from two areas in the UK, collected as part of the ShareD study. We present different interactional contexts where the person receiving a dementia diagnosis choose to align or misalign with the doctors’ interactional projects of diagnosis delivery, prescribing medication and recommending support. Examination of these instances suggests that misalignment between the assessment of symptoms may, at least in part, reflect interactional facework in the face of dementia as a challenge to self-identity.

Singing may be a relative strength for people with dementia, yet little is known of how individuals leverage it as a communicative resource in everyday interaction. This study analyzes how Dan, a man living with vascular dementia, modifies lyrics based on prior talk and the physical environment during interactions with his wife, Morgan. Using Conversation Analysis, I describe the emergent structure of his singing and what it accomplishes. Dan uses singing to do a range of interactional jobs (such as complimenting, complaining, and requesting), and his lyrics are susceptible to evaluation based on their construction and relevance to previous talk. Both participants treat his singing as humorous and creative wordplay, but the laughability of his singing is contingent on how he modifies the formulaic lyrics based on the current discursive context. Thus, singing is a way in which Dan situationally constructs himself as a funny, clever, and sociable person. Dan’s singing also indirectly indexes his close relationship with Morgan by assuming her shared musical knowledge. This analysis contributes to the study of identity construction by people with dementia, the understanding of how people adapt to changes in cognition, and the study of the structure and function of singing in everyday interaction.