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.

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 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.

In this chapter, we consider what methods and research in conversation analysis (CA), which examines the systematic accomplishment of action in its natural ecological contexts, can bring to sociopragmatics. While CA shares some of its methods with some other approaches in pragmatics – including its data-driven focus – we begin by first focusing on two aspects of the CA method that make it distinct from other approaches to language use: transcription and collections. We then go on to illustrate through two case studies how CA methods and research can help us leverage open areas of ongoing interest in sociopragmatics. The first case study focuses on (im)politeness and speech acts, while the second focuses on inference, identity and relationships. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the intersection between CA and sociopragmatics and possible directions for future research.