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.

This chapter discusses different types of evidence that conversation analysts use to ground their claims about social action. We begin by reviewing the epistemological perspective of CA, which demands that evidence reflect participants’ orientations; as a critical part of understanding the terms ‘participant orientation’ and ‘relevance,’ here we also discuss two ways in which CA’s position and emphasis on them are commonly misunderstood. The bulk of this chapter then reviews and illustrates a range of types of participant-orientation evidence. We organize our presentation of types of evidence roughly by sequential position vis-à-vis the focal action about which the analyst is making claims, including evidence to be found in: (i) next-turn, (ii) same-turn (e.g., same-TCU self-repair, accounts), (iii) prior turn or sequence, (iv) third turn/position (e.g., repair after next turn, courses of action/activity), (v) fourth turn/position, and (vi) more distal positions. We also discuss other forms of evidence that are not necessarily defined by sequential position, including: (i) third-party conduct, (ii) reported conduct, (iii) deviant cases, and (iv) distributional evidence. We conclude by offering some brief reflections on bringing different types and positions of evidence together toward the construction of an argument.

This chapter describes ways to approach the phonetic analysis of talk-in-interaction. It starts off with a brief overview of some of the general issues. These include how we go about observing and transcribing. These are practices common to Conversation Analysis and phonetics, and the discussion aims to bridge different disciplinary norms. The chapter also presents a phonetically informed approach to analysing speech in data sessions. The main part of the chapter works through a short fragment of data line by line, showing how conversational data can be approached from a phonetic perspective while adopting a CA approach to analysis, and connecting the reader to wider concerns that have been addressed in the literature. The topics covered include sequential organisation, including turn beginnings and ends; speech timing across turns, including an illustration of rhythmicity; discussion of intonation and its functions in conversation; the relationship between phonetic design and social action; ways of building a collection of examples for analysis.

While the preceding chapters of the Handbook have focused on practical skills in CA research methods, this chapter looks towards the path ahead. A diverse group of conversation analysts were asked to outline possible projects, point readers toward un- or under-described interactional phenomena, and discuss persistent issues in the field. The contributions address future advances in data collection, specific interactional practices, the complex interplay between language and the body, and cross-cultural and crosslinguistic comparisons, among other issues. The chapter concludes with a concise reiteration of the bedrock principle that underpins all CA research methods.

When examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – conversation analysts monitor for, and organize collections of target phenomena around, structural position: Where on a transcript and when in an unfolding real-time encounter does a participant enact some form of conduct? This chapter demonstrates the importance of paying close attention to structural position as requisite for understanding how participants design their conduct to be recognizable as particular social actions in interaction. After first considering how to identify the position of participant conduct, this chapter presents several forms of evidence that an action takes on different meaning based upon how it is positioned, including how the position of a silence affects its meaning; the reflexive relationship between position and turn design; and the position of an action within a sequence, explicating how CA work on preference organization necessitates analyses of how participants position both their sequence-initiating and sequence-responding actions. To exemplify how structural position can serve as a key avenue leading directly to findings about the orderliness of human action, this chapter describes how its author has gone about analyzing participants’ positioning of sequence-initial actions in both institutional and casual interactions.

How do we find a candidate phenomenon in interactional data? In this chapter we examine a number of methods for doing so. We make an initial distinction between observations and discoveries. Drawing on the cumulative experience of a number of conversation analysts, we provide some guidelines to help analysts develop observations into discoveries. We then investigate a range of approaches to identifying action: the heart of CA method. This includes an overview of Schegloff’s analytic ‘keys’ as a way into data. All of these approaches have the radically inductive methods of CA at its core. However, there are other starting points, and we discuss some of these alternative ways of bringing CA methods to bear on the data of interaction.

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.