Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
1990:286; Heritage 2003). While conceptually ethnomethodological, 5 it developed its own distinctive
approach, methodology and topics of interest, based largely on the pioneering work of Harvey Sacks and
his associates, Gail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff. Sacks believed that sociology could be a 'natural
observational science', one that would be able to handle the details of actual events, 'formally and
informatively' (Sacks 1984:21-27). This is the context in which he began to work with tape-recorded 6
instances of naturally occurring conversations and the following extract helps to clarify his position:
Such materials had a single virtue, that I could replay them. I could transcribe
them somewhat and study them extendedly - however long it might take. It was
not from any large interest in language or from some theoretical formulation of
what should be studied that I started with tape-recorded conversations, but simply
because I could get my hands on it and I could study it again and again, and also,
consequentially, because others could look at what I had studied and make of it
what they could, if, for example, they wanted to be able to disagree with me.
The central goal of conversation analytic research, which is to describe and explicate 'the competences
that ordinary speakers use and rely on in participating in intelligible, socially organized interaction'
(Heritage & Atkinson 1984:1), clearly conforms to the ethnomethodological principles of locating and
describing the methods and techniques that people use to produce and interpret social interaction. This
represents a clear shift away from traditional sociological concerns 7 . In fact it is somewhat paradoxical
that while talk is fundamental to social interaction the focus of conventional sociology has been on the
content of talk rather than the analysis of talk as a subject in itself. The interview, for instance, is a
primary data collection technique within sociology, yet it only uses talk as a means to obtain data.
Conversation analysis redresses this imbalance to some extent, and by treating talk as a topic of inquiry
in its own right, seeks to examine the structure and organization underlying it. Thus Button and Lee
(1987:3) have characterised conversation analysis as a new style of sociology which leaves behind the
positivistic and functionalist assumptions of the past and 'instead of using data as a resource to test
theories as to the nature of social organisation, it examines the social organisation of materials in an
attempt to describe and understand that nature'.
Clearly conversation analysis represents a radical departure from the methods of social research
traditionally adopted by social scientists. However this entails not just a critique of the quantitative
techniques associated with survey and experimental research but also of those methods typically
favoured by ethnographers. Although conversation analysis involves an in-depth analysis of naturally
occurring data it differs from conventional field research in that it does not rely on the observer's
memories and notes. The problem with traditional ethnography according to Psathas (1990:9) is that
because field notes are 'subject to all the vagaries of attention, memory, and recall', we cannot recover
and re-examine the interactional phenomena themselves. By contrast, the employment of audio and
video technology enables conversation analysts to systematically and repeatedly examine the raw data
of conversational interaction in its original form. Some of the methodological benefits generated by
this distinctive form of data collection are clearly identified in the following extract from Atkinson and
Heritage (1984:238):
the use of recorded data is an essential corrective to the limitations of intuition and
recollection. In enabling repeated and detailed examination of the events of
elsewhere (see, for example, Lee, 1987:19-53; Goodwin and Heritage, 1990:283-287; Zimmerman,
1988:406-412; Sharrock and Anderson 1987:290-321; Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Leiter, 1980;
Benson and Hughes, 1983; Psathas, 1995: 3-8; Cmerjrkova and Previgano 2003).
5 Developed by Harold Garfinkel, ethnomethodology refers to the study of commonsense knowledge
and practical reasoning in everyday life. As Hutchby and Woffitt (1998) point out, from this
perspective, the aim of sociology is to describe the methods that people use for accounting for their
own and other’s actions. For a detailed exposition of this approach see Garfinkel (1967) or Heritage
(1984).
6 The ability to record and replay episodes of talk-in-interaction played a crucial role in the emergence
of conversation analysis and the potential of current technology to make this data much more widely
available is likely to have a similar impact on its ongoing development. In this context the move to
make recordings of spontaneous speech data from speakers who stammer available to the research
community through Stammering Research represents an exciting prospect for the future development
of this field (see Howell and Huckvale, 2004 for details of this initiative).
7 Although it has now developed into a truly interdisciplinary endeavour, in order to fully understand the
methodological stance and preoccupations of conversation analysis, an appreciation of the precise nature of its
relationship with sociology is necessary (see Lee 1987: 19-53 for a details of the connections between sociology and
conversation analysis)
251