Talk and Interaction in Social Research Methods

Paul Drew, Geoffrey Raymond, Darin Weinberg

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781446227046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

?This book admirably fulfils its stated objective of describing social research methods in action and exploring, from a range of perspectives, the linguistic shaping of social context. Overall, this is a balanced, well-edited and coherent collection of papers, bringing together high quality work from recognized authorities in the analysis of talk-in-interaction. It is also highly accessible; it would certainly make an excellent resource book for undergraduate, graduate (and practising!) social scientists ? - Rebecca Clift, University of Essex

? Talk and Interaction in Social Research Methodologies is a much-needed methods text. Focusing on research methods in action, the volume offers a new way of viewing the realities of social research. By taking language use seriously, the text reveals the details and depths of a wide range of research projects as they have seldom been presented before.

This is the first book of its kind to offer such a powerful and insightful depiction of the role of talk-in-interaction in relation to social research methods. The book?s plan is creative and unparalleled. There?s nothing else like it.

The editors—Paul Drew, Geoffrey Raymond and Darin Weinberg—represent the very best from multiple traditions of researching talk-in-interaction—from both sides of the Atlantic. The chapters are written by a sterling collection of researchers—a virtual honor roll of conversation analysts and kindred spirits.

This book is a "must read" for social researchers of all disciplines who are interested in social interaction. It should be assigned reading for all graduate students being introduced to qualitative methods. It should be on every qualitative researcher?s book shelf. It is a tour de force in demonstrating the absolutely fundamental position that language use holds in social science methodology? - James A Holstein, Marquette University

This is a methodology text with a difference. It demonstrates the importance of talk in a variety of social research methodologies. Even documents, the seemingly least interactional form of social data, are shown to have important interactional dimensions. The book focuses systematically on how sociological methods are essentially conducted through forms of spoken interaction, and how these interactions shape the results that emerge in research. The book demonstrates:

"How spoken interactions shape the outcomes of core research methodologies

"The role which talk-in-interaction plays in key substantive areas of sociology notably race, crime, gender and media

"Reveals the interactional underpinnings of research methodologies

This is the first text aimed at an undergraduate and Master?s audience in Sociology and Social Research, which shows the crucial part that spoken interaction plays in the conduct and products of conventional sociological methodologies.

CHAPTER ONE The Language of Social Science: A Brief Introduction

Darin Weinberg

 

This book is intended for undergraduate and graduate methods courses in sociology and the social sciences more broadly. In this sense, it is certainly a ‘methods text’ – that is, a text intended to help students become better practitioners of social scientific research. However, it is a methods text with a difference. Instead of providing standardized statements of social research methods, defending their validity and/or specifying their scope, we actually describe social research methods in action. More particularly, we show how in various ways social research methods are inevitably linguistic devices and that their use is always and inevitably responsive to the exigencies of language use. This is not only true of the techniques we employ to gather and interpret data, but is equally true of a vast range of the social phenomena we seek to understand. By describing methods in this way, it is hoped this text will acquaint students with the realities of social research at a level of depth and detail they have seldom, if ever, been able to see.

Perhaps more than any other single social phenomenon, language has always held a place of foundational importance in the social sciences. For many of the earliest social scientists, it was our capacities as language users that distinguished humanity from the animal kingdom and thereby set the primordial boundaries for the subject matter of the social sciences. Around the turn of the twentieth century, social scientists also began to demonstrate that language not only describes but also profoundly and systematically shapes the character of the social world. In doing so they helped establish the independence of the social sciences from biologically determinist visions of the human condition. For if language not only depicts, but shapes, social life, then the users of different languages (and the structures that comprise their respective societies) must also be shaped in systematically different sorts of ways. Because our biological characteristics are largely uniform across different human societies they cannot but provide rather blunt theoretical instruments for the study of human historical and cultural variation. Thus claims that language – and more specifically, linguistic diversity – is a fundamental feature of the human condition rose up together with claims for the importance of the social sciences as such.

However, the social scientific celebration of linguistic diversity and a distinctively sociologically deterministic vision of the human condition was haunted from its inception by a rather ironic spectre. Just as they touted the reality of linguistic diversity and linguistic determinism in the wider social world, social scientists also clung fast to uniform and standardized conceptions of their ‘science’ itself (see Mead 1923). The social sciences may study myriad social processes that are themselves shaped by language, but they were held to do so by virtue of a unified and determinate ‘Scientific Method’ that was completely immune to corruption by any type of social influence, including that of language. This image of ‘Scientific Method’ was borrowed from the natural sciences and reflected a philosophical commitment to the belief that science is exclusively concerned with producing universally valid statements that correspond with a unified and unchanging natural world. Unlike the flawed belief systems that science was intended to replace, the ‘Scientific Method’ was thought to fortify scientists against the biases introduced by the social contexts within which their investigations were conducted. Hence, whether social scientists conducted participant observation, surveys, archival investigations, life histories, interviews, or any other manner of social analysis, they were enjoined to adhere to strictly specified procedures with the aim of fortifying themselves against social biases and producing universally valid statements regarding the nature of the social world. The diverse linguistic forces shaping and particularizing social reality beyond the walls of academia were not held to exert any significant influence on the social scientific work conducted within those walls.

This unself-conscious exaltation of a unified ‘Scientific Method’ and what Hilary Putnam (1987) has called ‘seventeenth century objectivism’¹ remains with us in many of the most established branches of the social sciences. However, it has become increasingly obvious that this position endures more by virtue of the intellectual inertia of its adherents than the soundness of the arguments in its favour. Beginning in the 1960s, a growing number of social scientists began paying more serious attention to science, discovering it to consist less in a uniform logic of inquiry than a collection of social institutions, social organizational contexts, and/or particular types of collective action. This movement in the social sciences was greatly inspired by Thomas Kuhn’s seminal text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Building on Kuhn’s achievements, David Bloor, Barry Barnes, and several of their colleagues at the University of Edinburgh produced some of the first thoroughly² sociological studies of science and established what became known as the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

The Edinburgh group took a macro-sociological approach to the study of scientific knowledge, linking the findings of various historically notable scientific projects and the macro-social contexts within which those findings were produced. By and large, their explanations highlighted how powerful social ‘interests’, rather than adherence to a uniform logic of empirical inquiry, governed the directions taken by scientific progress (see Barnes 1977). Following closely on the heels of the ‘Edinburgh school’, a micro-sociological approach to the study of scientific knowledge production emerged around Harry Collins and his colleagues at the University of Bath. In place of ‘interests’, the Bath school tended to highlight the contingently negotiated patterns of social interaction according to which scientific controversies were resolved and credible knowledge produced (Collins 1985). As the decade of the 1970s closed, a handful of new approaches to the sociology of science emerged, many of which utilized discourse analytic and/or ethnographic approaches to highlight the important roles played by various linguistic processes in the production of natural scientific knowledge (see Garfinkel et al. 1981; Gilbert and Mulkay 1984; Latour and Woolgar 1979).

I have dwelt for a time on these discoveries in the sociology of the natural sciences for the simple reason that social scientists, particularly those of us interested in scientific methodology, have for many years looked to the natural sciences for our models of what sound scientific practice ought to look like. Very often claims that the social sciences are vulnerable to social influences have been made to distinguish them from the natural sciences and to denigrate their legitimacy as sciences. Whereas natural scientists were held up as dispassionate and value-free practitioners of universally valid methods of empirical inquiry, social scientists have been dismissed as ad hoc ideologists, slapdash and irrational advocates of one or another partisan outlook on the proceedings of the social world.

Hence, insofar as social scientists have sought to model their own research methods on those used in the natural sciences, detailed empirical studies of how natural scientists actually go about their research should be profoundly instructive. One of the most recurrent findings these studies have produced is that there is generally a rather considerable divergence between philosophical, programmatic, and/or other post hoc accounts of research methods in the natural sciences and the actual achievement of natural scientific research in practice. Whereas philosophical and programmatic generalizations overwhelmingly emphasize unity, formal logic, and the rigorous standardization of natural scientific methods, empirical observation of natural scientific research in practice overwhelmingly tends to reveal a world of contingency, improvisation, and local variation in natural scientific work (see Lynch 1993). As it turns out, there is a good deal more to the actual ‘methodology’ of natural scientific work (if by this we mean the practical procedures through which good science gets done), than orthodox texts on ‘scientific method’ have ever told us. Attention to the empirical details of natural science in action has shed light upon a rather vast collection of practical skills and co-ordinated activities that merely formal accounts of natural scientific method have completely overlooked.

While social scientific research on natural scientific practice has grown into a thriving sub-discipline within the social sciences, interest in turning the social scientific gaze back upon the social sciences themselves has been slower to materialize. There are, however, several noteworthy exceptions to this general rule. For example, important socio-historical analyses have been done of the social sciences in general (see Ross 1991), of statistics (see Hacking 1990; Porter 1996), anthropology (see Asad 1973; Kuklick 1991; Pagden 1982; Stocking 1987), economics (see Mirowski 2001), history (see Novick 1988), psychology (see Dansiger 1990; Rose 1989), and others. With respect to sociology itself, distinguished scholars, including Stephen Turner and Jonathan Turner (Turner and Turner 1990), Jennifer Platt (Platt 1995), Martin Bulmer (Bulmer 1984), Charles Camic (Camic 1989, 1995), Jean-Michel Chapoulie (Chapoulie 1987), and Martyn Hammersley (Hammersley 1989) have produced exemplary socio-historical analyses. Their work has cast new and invaluable light upon the origins and changing institutional characteristics of academic sociology and their respective effects on the substance of sociological knowledge itself. Programmatic calls for a ‘reflexive sociology’ (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) also indicate an increasingly broad appreciation for the value of doing sociological research on the production of social scientific knowledge.

In addition to research on the social history of the social sciences there is now an important body of sociological research concerning the linguistic performances through which the authority of social scientific research is sustained (see Atkinson 1990; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Pollner 1992; van Maanen 1988; Woolgar 1988). Moreover, a growing number of ethnographers and discourse analysts are also beginning to produce epistemologically self-conscious studies of the mundane practices through which they or other social scientists collect and analyse their data itself (see Bourdieu 1996; DeVault 1999; Emerson et al. 1995; Gubrium and Holstein 1997; Harding 1991; Maynard and Schaeffer 2000; Maynard et al. 2002; Pollner and Emerson 1988; Smith 1989). The present volume builds upon and develops this programme of research into the linguistic and interactional details of social scientific knowledge production. By bringing together essays on the diverse roles played by language and linguistic interaction in the practical accomplishment of research using key social scientific methods and in several key substantive research areas it offers the most in-depth treatment of these issues yet available.

The first section of the book is comprised of essays focusing on how language and linguistic interaction figure in six of the most heavily utilized methods of conducting social research in the world today (i.e. survey research, interviews, ethnography, audio/video analysis, focus groups, and the analysis of documents). In the essays comprising the book’s second section, attention is given to the insights and analytic advantages to be had in researching language and linguistic interaction as they figure in five major substantive research areas in the social sciences (i.e. gender and sexual identity, race, crime and deviance, news media, and social institutions). While space constraints do not allow me to summarize the findings of each of the contributions to this volume here, in what follows of the rest of this introduction I will briefly sketch what these chapters have in common and what is unique about the contribution this volume makes as a whole.

In the first place, each of the following essays is premised on the observation that social research methods, as well as a vast range of the substantive topics we consider through the use of those methods, are fundamentally and inescapably linguistic phenomena. This is so in the very obvious sense that formal specifications of social research methods and findings must inevitably take linguistic form and therefore must yield to the constraints that this form exerts upon them. But less obviously, the chapters that make up this volume also demonstrate how in various ways our practical implementations of social research methods and the practical realization of our phenomena themselves must inevitably bend to the pressures the routine demands of ordinary language use exert upon them. No matter the extent or the ingenuousness of our efforts to standardize the procedures through which our research is conducted, these procedures cannot be made immune to the vicissitudes imposed by linguistic interaction. This is not, however, treated as cause for scientific despair but for vigilant attention to the precise manner in which our research practices and topics might be influenced by their embodiment in linguistic interaction.

In the second place, each of the chapters that make up this volume treats the nature of language in a particular kind of way. In stark opposition to analytic approaches like structural linguistics and speech act theory, each of which construe ‘language’ as a relatively static system of symbolic structures that is distinguishable from its instantiation in the everyday conduct of social life, contributors to the present volume are aligned in treating language as a form of incarnate social action. According to this approach, it is the social contexts within which linguistic gestures actually occur and the range of activities those contexts are held to warrantably accommodate, that alone provide for the intelligibility that social actors find in linguistic gestures. Hence, the analysis of language must consist in detecting the collaborative activities conducted through actual instances of language use rather than constructing abstract systems from decontextualized bits of symbolic structure. For the contributors to this volume, analysing research methods as linguistic phenomena thus means analysing them as linguistically embodied devices for the conduct of particular types of empirically identifiable social activity.

Implicit in the treatment of language as social action is the view that competent language users possess and routinely employ a catalogue of tacit skills for identifying the practical upshot of linguistic gestures in context. Hence, another set of insights that flow from the contributions to this volume concerns the relationship between these kinds of skills – what ethnomethodologists have often called ‘mastery of natural language’ or ‘ordinary practical reasoning’ skills – on the one hand, and the more explicitly acknowledged and narrowly specified skills generally presumed necessary to conduct sound social scientific research on the other. Harold Garfinkel (1991: 16) has famously argued that our ordinary practical reasoning skills, while irremediably unavoidable, are ‘specifically uninteresting’ to those who possess and rely on them. In many cases this is quite true. However, readers will find that several of our contributors provide specific and compelling arguments for why social scientists ought to be interested in the relationship between the ethnomethods at work in social scientific practice itself (and in the social worlds we study) and social science research methods more traditionally construed.

A fourth point of commonality among the contributions to this volume is their orientation to the nature and importance of social context. As was noted above, early social scientists viewed scientific methods largely as techniques with which to fortify themselves against the corruptions introduced by social contextual influences. The project of science was thought to require purification from the particularities of one’s social context and production of epistemologically transcendent truths or what Thomas Nagel (1986) has aptly called a ‘view from nowhere’. Sociologists have effectively questioned this view and have argued that various features of social context, including, of course, the interactional and linguistic context, are not only unavoidable but are in fact indispensable to science. The contributors to this volume share this view. But in addition to shaping how scientific methods are used, contributors to the present volume treat social context as in fact reproduced and altered in and through the course of linguistic practice itself. John Heritage (1984b: 242) makes this point as follows:

 

Since every ‘current’ action will itself form the immediate context for some ‘next’ action in a sequence, it will inevitably contribute to the framework in terms of which the next action will be understood. In this sense, the context of a next action is repeatedly renewed with every current action. Moreover, each action will, by the same token, function to renew (i.e. maintain, alter, or adjust) any more generally prevailing sense of context which is the object of participants’ orientations and actions.

Many of our contributors therefore pay close analytic attention to the conversational sequences within which social research methods are put to use and demonstrate in various ways how the sequence of talk has consequences for the ways in which these methods are operationalized and understood. Once again, these points are not made in a spirit of correction or critique, but only to demonstrate the benefits that may accrue to social scientists by taking these influences into account in the conduct of their research. Taken together, these essays powerfully demonstrate the fundamental place that language and linguistic interaction occupy in social science methodology and hence the importance of analysing language and linguistic interaction to fully grasp those methods. This, in turn, opens up a wide range of novel or hitherto under-appreciated topics, research questions, and research directions for future sociological consideration. The chapters that comprise the second part of the volume go some considerable distance in specifying just what some of these new research questions and agendas are and could become.

 

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Notes

 

1.     By this Putnam means the doctrine that science consists solely in the work of producing theories that correspond with a uniform and constant reality that exists independently of our efforts to understand it.

2.     Earlier sociological research concerning the natural sciences (see Mannheim 1936; Merton 1970 [1938]) tended to immunize the putative core of natural scientific research from sociological influence and was, in this sense, less thoroughly sociological than that of Bloor, Barnes, and company, who insisted the influence of sociological forces went all the way to the core.

PART ONE Talk-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Transcription Symbols
• 1 The Language of Social Science: A Brief Introduction
• Part I: Talk-in-Interaction in the Context of Research Methodologies
• 2 Standardization-in-Interaction: The Survey Interview
• 3 Interaction in Interviews
• 4 Analysing Interaction in Focus Groups
• 5 When Documents ‘Speak’: Documents, Language and Interaction
• 6 Observation, Video and Ethnography: Case Studies in Aids Counselling and Greetings
• 7 Language, Dialogue and Ethnographic Objectivity
• Part II: Talk-in-Interaction in the Context of Research in Fields of Substantive Sociological Research
• 8 Questions at Work: Yes/No Type Interrogatives in Institutional Contexts
• 9 Understanding News Media: The Relevance of Interaction
• 10 Talking Sex and Gender
• 11 Anomalies and Ambiguities: Finding and Discounting the Relevance of Race in Interracial Relationships
• 12 Using Talk to Study the Policing of Gangs and its Recordwork
• References
• Index