Doing CA: Collecting, transcribing, and analyzing data

This chapter provides a practical overview of doing conversation analysis (CA) research. It discusses the various steps that are typically done before you present your findings in a publication. These steps include how to formulate or “translate” a research question/topic so that CA can address it; how to get access to the relevant site(s) of recording; how to prepare for the recording, including selecting the appropriate recording devices; and the purpose of transcribing (fragments of) the data. These steps are crucial because they define the type and quality of the recordings and, hence, the kind of analytic points you can make with them. Analyzing the data is an iterative process and typically includes discussions of data fragments with colleagues before finding a candidate phenomenon that can be analyzed further. The analytic aim is to describe a social practice to which the participants in the recording demonstrably orient.