Why conversation analysis?
“We live our lives by talking to others. We build, maintain and end our personal and professional relationships. We buy and sell. We get and give help. We are excited, irritated, embarrassed and consoled in response to things others say to us. Yet psychologists have often shied away from studying talk, preferring to ask people to report on their communicative lives in interviews or questionnaires, or to simulate them in laboratories. Psychologists have argued that people’s talk is too idiosyncratic or too messy to capture and study systematically. But conversation analysts have shown that talk is, in fact, highly organised.”
— Professor Elizabeth Stokoe in an interview with the BPS The Psychologist
This course is built on a body of research from conversation analysis.
The next section of the course will show you what conversation analysis is (the study of talk-in-interaction), and explain the rules of talk. You implicitly know these rules as an accomplished speaker, but we will learn that using the methodological microscope of CA to (forensically) understand the technical details of how talk works, allows us to identify particular practices that are useful in therapeutic interaction.
You already know what works from your clinical experience, but this course will show you why it works from an interactional perspective.
'What works’ can be found in the interaction itself. Rather than surveying ‘effectiveness’ after the intervention, relying on self-reporting or theorizing, we can see how clients respond to questions or advice in the moment-by-moment work of therapy. As a methodology, conversation analysis insists on using video- or audio-recordings of real interactions, to see how certain practices are achieved everyday exchanges.
Why conversation analysis for psychologists?
The intricacies of the formal study of linguistics may not seem immediately relevant to professional development in psychology, but there are a number of arguments for explicit teaching of the elements of talk for professionals who use conversation as a primary clinical tool.
All of the research and commentary in this course is informed by empirical evidence of what practitioners actually do and how clients typically respond to particular types of actions. The good news is that you don’t have to take my word for it; conversation analysis has a built-in ‘proof criterion’ (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974, p. 729) because CA researchers only pay attention to what speakers themselves pay attention to. We’ll learn more about this proof criterion in the next lesson.
Rather than make assumptions about how talk works, better to rely on evidence of what actually happens. In other words:
“Our intuitions about language are typically strong but wrong.”
— Enfield (2017, p.58)
Interviewing people about what they think works also fails to illuminate the practices that make particular outcomes possible. In other words, we can understand the process of therapy:
“not by questioning the participants, but rather through study in detail of the actions they perform as the talk itself emerges.”
— Goodwin (1984, p. 243)
And specifically in relation to therapy:
“practice, textbooks may sometimes offer idealised examples but such idealisations can only get across what the author believes is the general ‘feel’ of an interaction, and may be wildly different from the specifics of actual talk.”
— Antaki (2014, p. 17)
Similarly, role play does not provide us with an accurate depiction of how workplace interaction unfolds. Professor Liz Stokoe developed the 'Conversation Analytic Role Play Method' specifically to build communication training that is grounded in evidence:
Conversation analysis is an entirely data-driven, qualitative approach to studying interaction, because knowing how often something happens does not tell us how it is done.
Research that informs this course is wholly concerned with the how: detailing the practices of therapy to identify features of the interaction itself that inform outcomes for clients. The premise of this course is that sharing insights into the interactional practices of therapy informs professional learning across different approaches to therapy. Clinical researchers (conversation analysts working as psychotherapists) support this approach to praxis:
“We start from the basic premise that all forms of psychotherapies, regardless of the particular theoretical framework that underpins the treatment are, at the core, discursive. Psychotherapy inevitably involves some kind of engagement and interaction between a client(s) and a help provider. And this engagement is essentially dialogical in nature involving the negotiation of shared meanings, common goals, and ways to make progress toward these common goals. From this perspective, the differences between treatments that are identified as discursive therapies (e.g., narrative (White, 2007) and those that usually are not labeled as such (e.g., psychoanalysis) refer to the theoretical assumptions with respect to the mechanisms of change but, in each case, the process of therapy, what actually happens during treatment is, universally, a series of discursive engagements”
— Horvath & Muntigl (2018, p. 73)
It is the emic perspective of conversation analysis (CA) – where findings can only be drawn from what the participants themselves pay attention to – that renders it useful for understanding the client’s experience of therapy. We can see what the client makes of what is talked into being during therapy sessions; the evidence is there for us to look at in the talk itself.
So the aim of this course is to condense, consolidate and share some CA fundamentals for psychotherapy, to inform part of your ongoing professional development.
“CA perspective can give clinical practitioners inspiration to observe the interactional side of the therapeutic process, and the ways in which the clinical work connects with the norms and expectations of conversation in general.
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— Voutilainen and Peräkylä (2016, p. 553)
This foundation course will illustrate why empirical evidence is best suited to understanding how therapeutic talk works.