Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons^™

Participation, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

What does it take to participate in direct, naturally occurring social interaction? Conversation analytic (CA) studies reveal that “participation”—who participates, when, and how—is dynamic and locally, multimodally achieved by the people involved. Particularly in social situations when people are concurrently accessible to one another’s naked senses (Goffman, 1964), co-participation is enabled and performed through embodied and vocal resources including talk, gaze, facial displays, body orientation/posture, proximity, and gestures (e.g., M. H. Goodwin, 1999; C. Goodwin & M. H. Goodwin, 2005; Pillet-Shore, 2010; Sidnell, 2009). Using a multimodal CA lens, this chapter illuminates how “participation” is achieved in real-time, naturally occurring …

‘Routines’ And ‘Formulaic Language’ In Conversation Analysis (Author's Extended Data), Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

Though the field of conversation analysis (CA) was founded upon examinations of interactional “routines” such as conversation openings and closings, conceptualizing and categorizing communicative phenomena as “formulaic” is anathema to CA. This chapter details how, since its inception, CA work has empirically elucidated how participants to recorded episodes of naturally occurring social interaction actively and collaboratively accomplish conversational activities as ‘routine’ or not by selecting from available action alternatives, spontaneously coordinating their selections vis-à-vis one another. Taking a multimodal CA approach, this chapter reviews state-of-the art literature on how people open and close in-person and telephone conversations, showing the immense …

Crisis Negotiation Techniques In Interactional Context: Managing A Suicide Threat In An Emergency Service Call, Angela Garcia

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

Previous research reveals that standard crisis negotiation techniques are useful in assisting suicidal persons, but how routine interactional procedures impact their implementation has not yet been sufficiently examined. Aim: This paper investigates how routine interactional procedures impact the effectiveness of crisis negotiation techniques in an emergency services call involving a suicide announcement. Methods: A publicly released emergency service call was transcribed and analyzed using the qualitative technique of conversation analysis. Results: The call taker used crisis negotiation techniques such as maximizing autonomy, displaying active listening, and distracting the caller to keep them on the phone. These techniques were implemented successfully …

Where The Action Is: Positioning Matters In Interaction, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

Position matters. As a conversation analyst examining any form of recorded synchronous human interaction – be it casual or institutional – I constantly monitor for, and organize my 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? Because conversation analysis (CA) is primarily focused upon action sequences, I use CA methods to examine the ways in which participants’ audible utterances and visible body-behaviors accomplish particular social actions due at least in part to their positioning within a sequence of interaction – …

Depersonalizing Troubles In Institutional Interaction: Routinizing In Parent-Teacher Conferences, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

This article advances our understanding of institutional interaction by showing when and how it can be advantageous for professionals to treat addressed-recipients as non-unique. Examining how teachers talk about children-as-students during parent-teacher conferences, this investigation illuminates several specific interactional methods that teachers use to depersonalize the focal student’s trouble, delineating as among these the novel practice of “routinizing”—citing firsthand experience with other similar cases. Analysis demonstrates how teachers use routinizing to enact their expertise, both responsively as a vehicle for attenuating and credentialing their advice-giving to parents/caregivers, and proactively to preempt parent/caregiver resistance to their student-assessments/evaluations. This research …

Doing “Care Work” In Emergency Service Calls, Angela Cora Garcia

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

Sending help when needed is a central role for emergency service call takers, but providing help during the call is also an important part of the job. The “care work” call takers do may assist callers with physical and emotional safety and enhance their resilience as they deal with ongoing emergencies prior to the arrival of the police. This conversational analytic study of a collection of 24 emergency telephone calls reveals the interactional techniques the call takers use to accomplish care work and shows how they integrate care work into their communication within the call.

Peer Conversation About Substance Use, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

What happens when a friend starts talking about her own substance use and misuse? This article provides the first investigation of how substance use is spontaneously topicalized in naturally occurring conversation. It presents a detailed analysis of a rare video-recorded interaction showing American English-speaking university students talking about their own substance (mis)use in a residential setting. During this conversation, several substance (mis)use informings are disclosed about one participant, and this study elucidates what occasions each disclosure, and how participants respond to each disclosure. This research shows how participants use casual conversation to offer important substance (mis)use information to their friends …

When To Make The Sensory Social: Registering In Copresent Openings, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

This article provides the first detailed empirical analysis of naturally-occurring videorecorded openings during which participants make the sensory social through the action of registering – calling joint attention to a selected, publicly perceivable referent so others shift their sensory attention to it. Examining sequence-initial actions that register referents for which a participant is regarded as responsible, this study elucidates a systematic preference organization which observably guides when and how people initiate registering sequences sensitive to both referent ownership and referent value. Analysis shows how choosing to register an owned referent puts involved participants’ face, affiliation, and social relationship on the …

Arriving: Expanding The Personal State Sequence, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

When arriving to a social encounter, how and when can a person show how s/he is doing/feeling? This article answers this question, examining personal state sequences in copresent openings of casual (residential) and institutional (parent-teacher) encounters. Describing a regular way participants constitute – and move to expand – these sequences, this research shows how arrivers display a non-neutral (e.g., negative, humorous, positive) personal state by both (i) deploying interactionally-timed stance-marking embodiments that enact a non-neutral state, and (ii) invoking a selected previous activity/experience positioned as precipitating that non-neutral state. Data demonstrate that arrivers time their non-neutral personal state displays calibrated …

How To Begin, Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Communication

This article introduces the special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction organized around the theme “Opening and Maintaining Face-to-Face Interaction.” The contributions to this special issue collectively consider “how to begin” – either a new encounter, or a new sequence after a lapse in conversation. All articles analyze naturally-occurring, videorecorded episodes of casual and/or institutional copresent interaction using multimodal conversation analytic methods. Though the opening phase of a face-to-face encounter may elapse in a matter of seconds, this article shows it to house a dense universe of phenomena central to sustaining our human sense of self and our …

Ethnolinguistic Convergence And Divergence Within Dyadic Communication, Anna E. Pitman

Honors College Research

This study investigated just one dependent variable within communication: ethnicity. Ethnicity often influences language. The study examined interethnic communication behaviors through the lens of the Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), as influenced by one of its offshoots, Ethnolinguistic Identity Theory (ELIT). Communication within CAT is given one of three labels—convergence, divergence, and maintenance. The study included four students at Harding University: two African American females, one Hispanic American female, and one Caucasian American female. The primary participant, an African American woman, had a recorded 20 minute conversation with each of the other three participants. Discussion questions provided were formulated to create …

What Went Right: Interactional Strategies For Managing Crisis Negotiations During An Emergency Service Call, Angela Garcia

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

This article is a conversation analytic investigation of an emergency service call in which a hostage in a school shooting played a dual role during the ongoing emergency—the role of 911 caller and the role of de facto crisis negotiator. The analysis will show how the caller used techniques such as footing shifts, tone of voice shifts, self-disclosure, and active listening techniques (including continuers, questions, repeats, and paraphrases) to successfully keep the conflict from escalating, maintain the autonomy of the intruder, and negotiate his surrender while working in collaboration with the 911 call taker.

A Relevance Rule Organizing Responsive Behavior During Projectably Multi-Unit Tellings, Anri Zama

Dissertations and Theses

Research on projectably multi-unit tellings (e.g., stories) has largely focused on their contexts of emergence, beginnings, endings, and uptakes (or lack thereof), rather than on their ‘middles.’ The relatively small literature on such ‘middles’ has focused on different types of responsive behaviors when they do occur (e.g., continuers). However, there is virtually no research on relevance rules that might systematically organize these ‘middles,’ including the production of responsive behaviors (or lack thereof) and the management of intersubjectivity. This thesis describes and defends one such relevance rule: Advisors are strongly accountable for responding – either vocally and/or nonvocally – at each …

‘Something Really Weird Has Happened’: Losing The ‘Big Picture’ In Emergency Service Calls, Angela Cora Garcia

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

This paper is a single case analysis of an emergency service call in which the caller failed to convince the call taker that the request for service was urgent in what turned out to be a tragic event. The analysis of this call using the techniques and findings of conversation analysis reveals that the actions of both the call taker and the caller created an interactional context in which the “big picture” (the potential for danger), became repeatedly submerged in “small picture” details (such as the identity and location of the caller and her role in the situation). This paper …

Characteristics Of Spoken And Written Communication In The Opening And Closing Sections Of Instant Messaging, Kenta Nishimaki

Dissertations and Theses

This study examines opening and closing segments in instant messaging (IM) and demonstrates how openings and closings differ between oral conversation and instant messaging as well as the factors that account for the difference. Many researchers have discussed the differences and similarities between spoken and written languages. Tannen (1980) claims that spoken and written languages are not distinct categories and there is a continuum between them. She also holds that interpersonal involvement is one of the factors that determine if a particular communication is closer to spoken communication or written communication.

I will analyze IM, which is best thought of …

'You're Lying To Jesus!': Humor And Play In A Discussion About Homelessness, L. David Ritchie

Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study applies recent theories about humor to a sample of talk among a group of young adults about the issues and problems associated with homelessness. In this conversation, participants demonstrate a pattern of joking and language play that expresses a complex and ambivalent set of attitudes and feelings toward homelessness and toward the homeless as both outcasts and refugees from conventional society. Humor is used both to express complex responses to homelessness and as a tool for managing the tone and direction of the conversation. The results demonstrate how the identification of patterns of joking and wordplay can provide …

Gatekeeping In A Tv News Editorial Conference: Shift Of Force, Other Media, Personal Experience And Pack Mentality, Kyril Daniel Plaskon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study uses Gatekeeping Theory and Conversational Analysis to describe how four factors influence news gatekeepers in a small group at one TV station. The four factors include shifting forces, other media, personal experience and pack mentality. They were identified through conversational analysis of pilot data and the research questions are supported in the literature as common influences in news gatekeeping. This study describes how those four elements occur during group conversation.

Analysis of the recorded data collected in five editorial conferences describes how the four factors are expressed by the gatekeepers as they consider events that may become news. …

The Problematics Of Representation In Community Mediation Hearings: Implications For Mediation Practice, Angela Cora Garcia

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

Empowering disputants to represent themselves and create their own agreement is a frequently cited goal of community mediation programs. This paper explores how disputants' positions and interests are represented in mediation, and investigates the implications of such representation for the negotiation process. This narrative analysis of transcripts of videotaped community mediation hearings shows that disputant self-representation in mediation is never unconstrained. The interactional organization of mediation and the actions of mediators work to limit and define how disputants formulate their utterances. Mediator representation of disputants varies in the degree of intervention or coercion applied. Mediators may limit themselves to rephrasing, …