Face-to-Face Interaction

Research, Methods, and Theory

Starkey Duncan, Donald W. Fiske

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317338772
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1977. This book focuses on how to do research in the area of face-to-face interaction when studying human social conduct. It covers the methods of data collection and analysis and looks at the efficiency of these. It secondarily considers a model for conceptualising such interactions, drawing together several social science components, especially linguistics, based on the idea that there is an organisational structure at work just as with grammar for language. Overall the book proposes a general conceptual framework for guiding empirical investigation, with emphasis on simultaneous study of a number of acts viewed within each other's contexts. This is an excellent resource for study on non-verbal communications, describing specific studies as well as offering the clear overview and model for research.

Part I
Face-to-Face Interaction: the Research Area and Some Basic Issues

1
Introduction

Let us consider the everyday world of face-to-face encounters. Commonplace activities in these encounters—greeting, discussing, joking, bargaining, directing, commiserating, getting acquainted, promising, rebuffing, and the like—make up the fabric of an individual's social world. In this monograph we shall be concerned with research on face-to-face interaction. In the course of our discussion we shall propose a research model for identifying various types of regularities in face-to-face interaction, and we shall outline a conceptual framework for interpreting these regularities.

We intend our proposals to be general with respect to type and location of interaction. Any occasion of face-to-face interaction will be considered potentially fair game for inquiry under our research model: conversations, family meals, elevator rides, athletic events, casual greetings in passing, and religious rituals. Nor need the location of the interaction be restricted. The location may be public, such as sidewalks, grocery stores, and airports; semipublic, such as offices, courtrooms, and classrooms; or private, such as homes.

We take for granted the centrality of face-to-face interaction for individuals and society. In Goldschmidt's (1972) words, "Social interaction is the very stuff of human life. The individuals of all societies move through life in terms of a continuous series of social interactions. It is in the context of such social encounters that the individual expresses the significant elements of his culture, whether they are matters of economics, social status, personal values, self-image, or religious belief [p. 59]." It is in this sense that we interpret Sapir's (1968) statement that society "is being reanimated or creatively affirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature which obtain among individuals participating in it [p. 104]."

It will not be surprising, then, that we find ourselves in agreement with Wilson (1972) when, in his review of Hinde's (1972) Non-verbal communication, he evaluates the general study of human communication as "what surely must be one of the most important of all emerging scholarly fields [p. 627]."

By focusing on the process of face-to-face interaction itself, we and others working in this area are intellectually indebted, as Kendon (1975) points out, to Georg Simmel, who placed great emphasis on forms of interaction (Levine, 1971), and to George Herbert Mead (1934), who urged the pursuit of social psychology by "starting out with a given social whole of complex group activity, into which we analyze (as elements) the behavior of each of the separate individuals composing it [p. 7]."

Face-to-Face Interaction

As Goffman (1971) and others have pointed out, it is difficult to choose a fully satisfactory term for this emergent area of inquiry. Among the many investigators concerned with various aspects of social conduct there is as yet no consensus on a name for the field itself. Although Goffman speaks of "face-to-face interaction," he chooses "public life" to designate the field he considers in his monograph, Relations in public. Others working with the same general sort of phenomena have used such terms as "context analysis" (Scheflen, 1966); "clinical sociology" (Lennard & Bernstein, 1969); "nonverbal communication" (e.g., Duncan, 1969; Hinde, 1972; Mehrabian, 1972); "ethnography of encounters" (Goldschmidt, 1972); "human ethology" or some similar term (e.g., Arensberg, 1972; Blurton Jones, 1972; McGrew, 1972; Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970); and "human linguistics" (Yngve, 1975).

Thus we posit our term, less from a conviction of its ultimate desirability than from the necessity of using some single term amid the confusing array of alternatives. More important is the special approach to describing face-to-face interaction, considered in the next section.

“Social Action”

We shall be selective in the manner in which these face-to-face interactions will be described. Acknowledging that the literature abounds with a seemingly endless variety of ways of describing interaction—from physiological indices to models of existential conflict—we approach the study of face to-face interaction through data based on the relatively specific, immediately observable behaviors, so numerous and varied, of which the larger activities are composed. We refer here to such things as head nods, smiles, hand gestures, leg crossings, eyebrow raisings, voice lowerings, throat clearings, completions of syntactic elements, head scratches, and posture shifts. When human conduct is characterized on this relatively low level of abstraction, judges use only a minimum of inferring in their ratings, and they need not summarize their judgments over time. These points and others are considered in greater detail in Chapter 2.

It is the sort of occurrence mentioned above that Goffman (1971, p. 1) has termed the "small behaviors." Our term for them will be acts or actions, a usage anticipated by Mead (1934), who spoke of the "social act."

The terms "act" and "action" are widely used by authors in social science and philosophy. For this reason some distinctions seem needed here. The purpose of these distinctions is to draw rough boundaries around the referent of the terms as we use them. It is hoped that subsequent discussion throughout this monograph further clarifies our usage.

In the first place, by focusing on action in social contexts we use the term "act" in a narrower sense than do the philosophers of human action (e.g., those represented in Brand, 1970, and in White, 1968). The broader concern of these philosophers is with all human action, including such elemental acts as an individual's moving his hand when he is quite alone. But we wish to preserve the widespread distinction between human action and "mere behavior," such as the beating of one's heart, perspiring under the influence of fear (Taylor, 1966), and sneezing. And we believe we use the term "action" in the same spirit as, for example, White (1968), who concludes a point in his discussion by stating that "none of this shows, of course, that human actions must be voluntary, intentional, purposive, conscious, etc....; but only that they must be the sorts of occurrences of which it makes sense to ask whether they are any or all of these [p. 8]."

As Kendon (1975) points out, this approach to describing face-to-face interaction (and that of many others in this area) contrasts sharply with the approach of Bales (1950), who also uses the term "act." In Kendon's words, the category system used by Bales and others (reviewed by Heyns & Lippett, 1954; and by Weick, 1968) "classifies not so much the behavior itself as the intent that is judged to lie behind the behavior [p. 4]."

Major Categories of Action

For the sake of convenience, the broad spectrum of acts potentially contributing to face-to-face interaction has been subdivided in a variety of ways. A representative set of categories and terms might include the following: (a) paralanguage (Trager, 1958), covering those elements of vocalization not typically included in the phonological description of language; (b) body motion, or kinesics (Birdwhistell, 1970), or visible behavior (Kendon, 1972a); (c) proxemics (Hall, 1966): use of "social and personal space and man's perception of it [p. 1]"; (d) use of scent (social olfaction); (e) haptics (Austin, 1967): body contact between persons; (f) the use of artifacts, such as dress and cosmetics; and (g) language, as it is traditionally defined. These categories will be briefly described, together with major transcription systems (if any) in each case

Trager's (1958) paper proposing the term "paralanguage" remains a basic reference with respect to those actions. He distinguished voice qualities, "actual speech events, phenomena that can be sorted out from what is said and heard [pp. 4–5]," from vocalizations, "actual specifically identifiable noises (sounds) or aspects of noises [p. 5]." Examples of voice qualities would be pitch range, resonance, tempo, and vocal lip control. Examples of vocalizations would be intensity (or stress), pitch height (or level of vocal pitch at some moment), extent (or duration of a syllable), laughing, crying, whispering, and several other sounds such as "uh–uh" (English negation), "uh–huh" (English affirmation), clicks, hisses, and the "uh" of filled pauses. While it is true that Trager's system is relatively undifferentiated in many areas it remains remarkably useful for much practical work. Crystal and Quirk (1964) and Crystal (1969) provide valuable theoretical discussions of intonation and paralanguage, as well as their own systems for dealing with these phenomena.

Body motion refers to a wide variety of visible actions. For example, in the study reported in Part III, the body-motion transcription included such actions as head gestures and movements (nodding, turning, pointing, shaking, etc.) and directions of head orientation; shoulder movements (e.g., shrugs); any facial expressions that could be clearly seen; hand gestures and movements of all sorts (each hand described separately); foot movements (each foot separately); leg movements; posture and posture shifts; and use of objects, such as pipe, kleenex, papers, and clip board.

Some relatively comprehensive systems for describing body motion exist. For example, Birdwhistell (1970, 1971) has published two systems, termed "microkinegraphs" and "macrokinegraphs," respectively. These two systems reflect the "etic–emic" distinction often encountered in linguistics. An "etic" descriptive system is one that remains as close as possible to raw physical description of the behaviors involved, as in a phonetic description of speech. A phonetic descriptive system might be designed to be applicable to any sample of speech in any language. Contrasting with an "etic" system would be an "emic" one representing a hypothesis as to the essential elements of particular social codes under investigation. One might, for example, propose a phonemic system for describing English speech. Such a system would constitute a hypothesis as to the essential phonological elements of English speech. Birdwhistell's microkinegraphic system attempts an "etic" description of body motion. Consisting of line drawings, angles, and other symbols, it is extremely fine grained and purportedly independent of the movement practices of specific cultures. The macrokinegraphic system uses symbols that can be found on a typewriter keyboard and is said to reflect the typical movements of "middle majority American movers." To our knowledge, neither system has been used by other investigators. Examples of Birdwhistell's use of the two systems may be found in the references cited above and in McQuown (1971).

Working within the tradition of ethology, Grant (1969) and McGrew (1970, 1972) have published inventories of typical body-motion actions (including facial expressions) they have encountered in the nursery-school children they have observed.

Ekman and Friesen have developed a system for transcribing facial expressions. Called the Facial Affect Scoring Technique (FAST), the system is designed for studies of the recognition of emotion on the basis of facial expression. Unlike the systems of, for example, Grant and McGrew, FAST is not an attempt to describe the set of facial expressions encountered in observed face-to-face interactions. Rather, as Ekman and Friesen explain, the facial categories were those that had proven useful for investigators concerned with judging emotion from the face. The system is based on matching each facial part of the observed expression with one of a series of pictures for each facial part, as posed by models. The system has not, at this writing, been published; however, it is generally described in Ekman, Friesen, and Tompkins (1971). (In addition, it may be noted that Ekman and Friesen, 1969, have published a conceptually based category system for hand movements.)

Ex and Kendon (1969) provide a notation system for the face. A modified version of the system was used by Kendon (1975b) in a study of the functioning of the face in interaction.

It is inevitable that investigators will encounter a somewhat different set of body-motion actions in different interaction situations. For example, Grant and McGrew in their studies of nursery-school children had to describe a set of actions considerably different from those encountered in the study of adult conversations presented in Part III. Studying subjects' actions during a word-association test, Krout (1935) observed a number of actions not reported by other investigators.

It is quite possible that investigators engaged in a given study will find useful categories in several different transcription systems, but no single available system entirely adequate to their needs. In such a case the investigator may devise a system that borrows from others, but also includes new categories necessary to account for observed actions. (Developing this type of transcription system is further considered in Part III.) In time, as more of such systems are developed and published, a highly useful set of categories for body motion may accumulate in the literature.

Hall (1963), who proposed the term "proxemics," has published a system for transcribing actions generally falling under that rubric. His "proxemic notation system" includes a representation of posture, the angle between the shoulders of two interactants, the distance between interactants, the type of touching (if any) that occurs (termed "haptics" by Austin, 1967), the directness of visual contact (if any), the body heat detected by the interactants, the odors detected by the interactants, and voice loudness (a dimension describable through paralanguage). In a later publication, Hall (1966) hypothesizes a set of distance zones that are socially significant for "non-contact, middleclass, healthy adults, mainly natives of the northeastern seaboard of the United States [pp. 109-110]." While there is now extensive literature on spatial arrangements in face-to-face interaction (e.g., Altman, 1970; Edney, 1974; Goffman, 1971; Hall, 1966; Pastalan & Carson, 1970; Pederson & Shears, 1973; Sommer, 1969), there has been virtually no empirical work published on such proxemic factors as touching, heat detection, and social olfaction for humans.

The Contemporary Study of Face-to-Face Interaction

As suggested by the many names used to refer to the investigation of social conduct, this research area belongs to no single traditional discipline; it has been interdisciplinary from the beginning. This has been a happy state of affairs. As investigators from a wide variety of disciplines have been drawn to the study of face-to-face interaction, this area has benefited from the application of their respective special insights and skills.

The nonverbal-communication research literature has received contributions from anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists seeking techniques for more concrete description of cultural processes and seeing face-to-face interaction as the central medium for the transmission and affirmation of culture.

Ethologists have been intrigued by the possibility of extending to humans the techniques for discovering and describing organization in the interaction of nonhuman animal species. These ethologists have brought with them a special appreciation of genetically based inputs to interaction.

Personality and individual-difference psychologists have sought in the study of acts alternatives to the traditional intrapsychic concepts such as trait and need, contemplating a reorientation of the description of persons in terms of social action.

Psychologists and psychiatrists studying psychotherapeutic processes and the sources of psychopathology have sensed the p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Face-to-Face Interaction: the Research Area and Some Basic Issues
• Part II Individual Differences in Brief Conversations
• Part III Studies of the Organization of Face-to-Face Interaction
• Part IV A Proposed Metatheory and Research Approach
• Appendix A Transcription and Reliability for the Replication Study
• Appendix B CRESCAT: A Program for Analyzing Action Sequences
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index