Conversation Analysis for Social Work

Talking with Youth in Care

Gerald de Montigny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367585341
• eBook ISBN: 9781351200738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

What do the stories youth in state care tell about life in their family of origin? What stories do they tell us about coming into care, living in care, and relationships with foster-parents and social workers? This book presents the stories of youth in care, though not in splendid isolation, but as interactively produced, turn by turn in interviews, and in conversations with other youth.

By using tools from conversation analysis (CA), the author examines interviews with youth in care and social workers, to unfold the essential and incorrigible reflexivity of story production. CA allows us to grasp the ways that a youth's story emerges turn by turn, and is an artefact of a social relation between a youth and an interviewer.

This text provides social work readers with a sense of art, artistry, and ambiguity at the heart of social interaction. It will be required reading for all social work students and academics looking for a deeper, more philosophical understanding of the profession.

1 Conversation analysis: Categories, contexts, and reality

Talk and social work

Talk is ubiquitous. We use talk day-to-day in a largely taken-for-granted practice for conducting our lives. As social workers, we use talk to communicate with and to understand clients, and to navigate face-to-face conversations with colleagues, staff meetings, case conferences, telephone calls, and so on. Though talk is everywhere around us, and though generations of scholars have examined language and communication it is only relatively recently, following the ready availability of audio-recording devices, that we have been able to focus in a detailed manner on the unfolding practice of talk-in-interaction. Although, it is self-evident that understanding talk demands understanding the use of words and language, the work we accomplish through talk is not entirely understandable through attention to language or to communication as such. A focus on talk-in-interaction brings to light the embodied production of talk in relationship and the reflexive accomplishment of iterative and identifiable forms of relationship through the art of differential forms of talk.

Today, what we know as conversation analysis has its origins primarily in the work of Harvey Sacks in the 1960s. Sacks’ attention to every-day ordinary conversation was informed by Harold Garfinkel’s own ethnomethodological attention to the mundane, ordinary, and every-day. Sacks and Garfinkel, although having met as early as 1959, did not begin working together until 1963, at which time Sacks joined Garfinkel at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide (Silverman, 1998:28). As Silverman points out, “the Suicide Prevention Center data were central to Sack’s first set of UCLA lectures in 1964–65” (1998:28), addressing such issues as “Rules of conversational sequence”, “On suicide threats getting laughed off”, “The correction-invitation device”, “Suicide as a device for discovering if anybody cares”, and importantly, “The MIR (Membership Inference-rich Representative) membership categorization device” (Sacks, 1995:v).

Sacks’ conversation analysis (CA) directs us to examine the relationships between forms of talk and the interactive and reflexive accomplishment of recognisable social contexts and socially relevant purposes. CA paid close attention to such simple things as greetings or conversational openings (Schegloff, 1968), turn taking or the sequential nature of talk (ten Have, 2007; Schegloff, 2007; 1990; 1968; Sacks et al., 1974), question/answer response structures (Heritage, 2002; Button, 1992), and other distinctive features, such as the use of acknowledgement tokens, ‘so …’ formulations (Hutchby, 2005), and so on. Simply expressed, how do two people do, or perform an interaction as a conversation between friends, rather than as an interview between a social worker and a client? Though both are occasions in which talk-in-interaction feature as a primary form of exchange or interaction between participants, are there structured differences in the forms of talk? Can a close analysis of the embodied production of talk, that is, its form or shape, mechanics, tone, sequencing, and structure indicate the different accomplishments of relationships? What are the resources and practices members draw on to perform such different occasions? How are these resources and practices both similar and different?

While talk might conventionally be thought of as providing a window into self and others, it is also in and through the activities of talking, formulating the right words, and reaching past the ineffability of embodiment that a self emerges, as one’s narrated existence, as recognised, as sensible, and as oriented and located inside of social relations. In our day-to-day worlds it is through talk, of course combined with other activities, whether pureeing vegetables, wiping food from an infant’s face, changing diapers, dressing a child for school, and so on, that parents produce relationships with children, demonstrate attention, concern, and caring, and do the work necessary to constitute this constellation of relations as a family. It is through talk, as combined with gestures and bodies intertwined that people become lovers. It is through talk, combined with showing a client a chair in our office, positioning our own chair opposite his or hers that social workers produce helping relationships.

Although much of the stuff of relationships is accomplished through talk, and while this book is concerned with analysing talk, it must be stated that while talk is often necessary for relationships it is rarely sufficient in itself. Talk as performed unfolds and is accomplished within successive moments and inside the orders of a social landscape. Talk, is a vital moment or element in the embodied performance for accomplishing both work and play, whether as talk at supper, a chat with a friend over coffee, a funeral, a court room, an interview, a team meeting, a case conference, and so on. Talk is always and everywhere produced by living people, embodied people, as located in shared lived-time and space, that is as Schutz observed, borrowing from Bergson (2001), in a social durée in which “we grow old together” (Schutz, 1962:174). Talk-in-interaction is somebody’s lived speaking with someone else. It comes to be produced here and now as incarnate activity. On the other hand, when analysts take up talk as the subject of interest, talk as the object of analysis, can all too easily become fetishised. Talk as an ‘it’ becomes the object of attention, and as such becomes abstracted, separated, and removed from the actual embodied activities of speakers. Additionally, when talk is taken up as an analytic subject, it can easily be transformed yet again into an agentic subject. Conversation analysis disrupts such analytic transformations of talk to redirect our enquiry to the embodied enactments of people in interaction, who use talk in situ, that is their talk, to produce the sense, coherence, and order of occasions. Talk should not be treated as separate from the people whose talk it is, despite our ability to record, transcribe, create taxonomies, orders, and analyses. Precisely as a result of the instantiation of talk-in-interaction as a manifestation of embodied, situated, and in vivo social interaction, it is vitally important that we also recognise the fundamental transformation effected by representing talk-in-action through transcription or conversation analysis as such.

It is hardly surprising that a feature of human life as pervasive as talk, albeit transformed into a study of grammar and language, logic and argument, and rhetoric and communication,¹ has been an object of intensive study across diverse fields, whether philosophy, communications, literature, or linguistics. What is perhaps surprising is how little attention was given historically to analysis of people’s actual talk as interaction, or to their talk as productive. It must be noted that the ephemeral nature of talk, that is its character as sound waves, as uttered, heard or misheard, and as situated in lived space and time, made the complex elements of talk elusive. Our ability to dissect and to discern the enormous complexity of talk-in-interaction is largely dependent on the development and evolution of readily available audio recording technologies. These technologies were not available in a convenient form until at least mid-20th century, first with the development of reel-to-reel tape recorders, then cassette recorders, and today with the advent of hand-held digital recorders. The technology of recording and endless replay subject to a disciplined attention to turn-by-turn processes of talk-in-action allowed for the development of conversation analysis. Through attention to the details revealed by recordings of talk those doing conversation analysis were able to probe and unfold the art of talk-in-action.

Historically the focus has been on language as systematised, idealised, abstracted, and written about. Wittgenstein, although understanding that “language games” developed within a “form of life” (2009:11), arrived at his analysis of language through consideration of abstracted forms and usage, albeit using examples that in their apparent simplicity seem readily sensible to speakers and listeners. Similarly, Searle, who employed the extremely rich notions of “speech acts”, develops his analysis through consideration of a philosophy of language, and an abstract “class of utterances”, e.g. performatives (Schegloff, 1995; Searle, 1979; 1969). Even the work of the Palo Alto group, which included Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Jay Haley, and Don Jackson, and which had significant influence on social work, did not look at talk-in-interaction as such. Despite the promise of The pragmatics of human communication source data relied primarily on extracts of dialogue from fiction, plays, and other literary products.² They derived their analysis of paradox and other problems in communication primarily from consideration of literary and linguistic analysis of formal properties of language and communication (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). It was on the basis of literary, general, and abstracted forms that the Palo Alto group developed schematisations and systematic rules to account for language use. In contradistinction to such theorising, Harvey Sacks directed his attention front-and-centre to audio recorded instances of people’s local and mundane talk-in-interaction.

Silverman observes that Sacks, though praising linguistics as “the most advanced social science” noted that, “Linguists tended not to look at conversations; indeed many did not go beyond the analysis of a sentence” (Silverman, 1998:50–51). Sacks wanted to redirect attention to the ways that speakers were able to produce, as a socially organised matter, understanding and sense in and through their conversations achieved across sequences. For Sacks analysis of talk revealed actual people’s living and embodied practical accomplishment of specific forms of social relations. Those who do conversation analysis focus on “talk-in-interaction” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998:13) as that by which people in their every-day, mundane, ordinary, taken-for-granted lives go about producing coherence, understanding, and society itself. Through CA we develop a close analysis of the details of talk-in-interaction to unfold the ways that participants produce, concretely, and palpably the coherence of socially organised forms of life as that which is experientially at hand, lived, and present.

Through the use of CA, talk becomes the focus of attention as it is produced day-in and day-out in conversations between friends, in interviews, in exchanges over a telephone, in short, wherever talk is employed interactively between people. Talk which is audio-recorded and then transcribed provides a detailed series of empirical specimens (ten Have, 2007), as at-hand, material evidence of how people in mundane and ordinary situations performed various forms of social interaction. People, when engaged in the acts of talking use their lungs, diaphragm, thorax, larynx and vocal chords, and mouth to produce sounds of varying tone, pitch, intonation, rhythm, volume, and so on. That which we call talk is a quite complex species-specific activity, which warrants study in and of itself. Beyond the physiology of talk are the effects or accomplishments achieved through talk, especially talk-in-interaction.

We use talk to instruct and coordinate activities with others, to share observations and understandings, and to signal or communicate feelings, emotions, and relationships of self with others. Talk as spoken is a physical practice which shapes relationships, whether as care, attention, animosity, work, and play, etc. The taken-for-granted coherence and order of every-day and local settings is actively and repeatedly produced by people in interaction, and as such is their lived coherence and order. Talk along with other disciplined physical movements, whether walking, driving a car, standing at a pedestrian crossing, or lecturing in a classroom emerges as embodied and interactive. Order in local scenes is as people accomplish it and bring it into being. Lived and experienced every-day orders emerge as essentially reflexive³ (Watson, 1987). Psathas (1995) has outlined that: “1. Order is produced orderliness. 2. Order is produced by the parties in situ; that is, it is situated and occasioned” (Psathas, 1995:2). For CA, as in ethnomethodology (EM) order is not imposed by the analyst, nor is it to be derived from the analyst’s generic, essentialist, idealist, or even empiricist imposition of concepts, categories, and theories. Instead, any and all social orders are recognised as produced in the living energy, practice, and socially oriented performances of members in situ as their quite practical accomplishment. Garfinkel differentiated EM from formal analysis (FA), and argued that “The premier policy of the worldwide social science movement, ‘There is no order in the plenum,’ is contradicted by the unique coherence of the things of immortal ordinary society” (2002:97). In contradistinction, Garfinkel advanced a program of studies which posed “the discipline-specific workplace question”:

How, in starting with everyday activities, being unavoidably and without remedy or alternatives in the midst of ordinary activities, not knowing nothing and certainly not knowing how to proceed knowing nothing. But to the contrary being answerable to the contingent facticities of produced everyday things, just how and just in any actual case, is the coherence of those ordinary things made? How in the unavoidable midst of immortal, ordinary society, and therein just in any actual case is the congregationally witnessable coherence of the most ordinary things in the world made in the details in and as of their empirical generality? In the details of their generality how is their coherence made accountable? How are they made demonstrable? How are they made examinable and researchable?

(2002:138–139)

Although Garfinkel’s language is not ordinary, he directs us to take up ordinary and every-day activities in their plenty, as they surround us, as we are surrounded by them, and as we participate in them. For social workers this means beginning with the quite mundane, ordinary, and every-day sites of our practice as reflexively accomplishing the orders of our offices and our professional work.

Order is iterative and recurrent. Analysis that aims to discover the production of orderliness turns to what people do in situ. This way of working provides for an analysis of “structures of social action” (Psathas, 1995:2–3) as lived, taken-for-granted, relied on, and as practically effected. Malone succinctly notes, “Conversational talk exhibits orderliness because it is produced in such a way that it will make sense for those for whom it is intended” (1997:36).

Given that so much social work comes to be achieved in and through talk, whether as interviews, assessments, case conferences, and so on, it seems natural that the concerns of CA should resonate with those of social work (Hall, Juhila, Matarese, & Nijnatten, 2014; Hall, Juhila, Parton, & Pösö, 2003). As noted above, until recently social workers have generally turned not to CA but to communication theory with the unfortunate effect that the analytic focus has been on talk not as practically realised but as idealised, theorised, taxonomised, and categorised. This has been most unfortunate, as social workers in their day-to-day practice work face-to-face with people and as a result need simple practical tools to understand how talk is actually effected. ten Have points out the traditional focus in thinking and writing about talk has been to address “how one should speak, rather than how people actually speak” (2007:3). Similarly, in social work much attention has been paid to directing students to emulate preferred forms of talking, e.g. reflection of feelings (Kadushin & Kadushin, 2013), reaching into silences (Shulman, 2016), paraphrasing responses, using open ended questions, seeking concreteness (Hepworth, et al., 2010). Of course, it is not surprising that social workers’ writings that address interviewing aim to help workers to improve their practice. Yet the attention to specifying optimal or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Conversation analysis: Categories, contexts, and reality
• 2. Structures of talk-in-interaction
• 3. Accounting for conversations
• 4. Topic as a resource for coherence
• 5. It says here…
• 6. Getting started: Writing and erasing youths’ stories
• 7. Relationship in an Interviews
• 8. Child protection and entries into care
• 9. Stories of coming into care
• 10. Social workers and children and youth in care
• 11. Conclusion: Seeing ‘the social’ in social work
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Index