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The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Conversation Analysis methods in arts
marketing research.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
More than words? Conversation analysis in arts marketing research
Terry O'Sullivan
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Terry O'Sullivan, (2010),"More than words? Conversation analysis in arts marketing research", International J ournal of Culture, Tourism and
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More than words? Conversation analysis in
arts marketing research
Terry O’Sullivan
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Conversation Analysis methods in arts
marketing research.
Design/methodology/approach – Eight telephone interviews are conducted with members of the
audience of a regional UK symphony orchestra who self-identi?ed as users of online message boards
(‘‘web forums’’). The interviews are transcribed and interpreted using techniques from Conversation
Analysis, an approach to qualitative data analysis which pays close attention to the details of
language-in-use as a form of activity by and between speakers.
Findings – Conversation Analysis-led interpretation suggests that motivations for participation in web
forums are more complex than literal analysis of interview data might reveal. Conversation Analysis’
detailed attention to howcommunicators manage their interaction emphasises the co-production of data
between respondent and interviewer. The manner of emotion and meaning (re)construction through
such exchanges provides valuable cues for researchers in interpreting respondent motivations.
Because of the personalised nature of arts experience, this highly speci?c, context-oriented approach to
understanding respondent meanings offers particular potential to arts marketing researchers.
Research limitations/implications – The use of produced data (interview transcripts) rather than
naturally-occurring data (spontaneous talk) in Conversation Analysis is controversial, but the paper
defends this choice.
Practical implications – Insights from Conversation Analysis enrich the interpretation of interview data
to enhance qualitative research in the arts.
Originality/value – The paper demonstrates the extra value scholars can leverage fromqualitative data
interpretation by Conversation Analysis, and thus adds to an understanding of arts consumers.
Keywords Conversation, Arts, Market research
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction and theoretical contribution
This paper explores and illustrates the use of methods from conversation analysis (CA) in a
speci?c arts marketing research context. Here the context is a research project using
telephone interviews to investigate web forum use by members of the audience of UK
symphony orchestras, but clearly the technique is extendable to many other enquiries
involving qualitative interviewing. The argument of the paper is that the considerable
investment of time and effort involved in using CA can yield worthwhile new perspectives on
data, and thus insights into issues of interest to arts marketers, which might otherwise be
unavailable. This introduction will attempt to de?ne (or at least describe) CA and discuss the
historical context of the development of this method, before arguing the appropriateness of
applying CA to interview data in addition to naturally-occurring data.
CA is one of a number of methods that fall into the general category of discourse analysis, an
approach to social research that looks for patterns in language in use (Taylor, 2001). The
various varieties of discourse analysis share an emphasis on the constitutive and situated
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VOL. 4 NO. 1 2010, pp. 20-32, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182 DOI 10.1108/17506181011024733
Terry O’Sullivan is a Senior
Lecturer in Management
based at the Open
University Business School,
Milton Keynes, UK.
Received October 2007
Revised June 2008
Accepted June 2008
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nature of language, opposing a commonsense view of language as simply re?ective of
reality, or separate from the social contexts which produce language. The focus of CA is on
social context above all else – in fact the primary concern is to see language as an activity.
Woof?tt (2001, p. 49) de?nes CA as ‘‘a method for the analysis of naturally occurring
interaction’’ – speci?cally, howconversational talk is organised. Conversation in this sense is
a generic term covering any kind of talk, whether informal (such as a group of neighbours
talking about cars) or institutional (such as an encounter between a doctor and a patient, or a
teacher and a class). A group of American sociologists developed CA in the 1960s and
1970s (Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson and Emmanuel Shegloff) in order to analyze how
people construct a common-sense social reality through the business of performing
everyday life, in the tradition of Gar?nkel (1967) and ‘‘ethnomethodology’’ (literally ‘‘people
method’’). Ethnomethodology grounds sociological analysis on actual instances of behavior
rather than the more distancing methods of laboratory experiments or researcher-led
accounts. The choice of recorded examples of conversation as data results from the
convenience and accessibility of such data sources, rather than from any intrinsic
commitment to textual data on the part of the researchers. It could be any other form of
observable interactive behavior, but it happens to be conversation because that was what
was available and met the researchers’ needs for close and repeated scrutiny (Woof?tt,
2001, p. 50). A further advantage of this kind of data is that different researchers can
conveniently share and re-analyze the data sets. This tradition continues in the way that
scholars publishing work using CA often make their data recordings available directly online
as well as through transcribed excerpts in printed articles (e.g. Llewellyn, 2008).
It is important to keep the behavioral focus of CA in mind when seeking to apply its
techniques to wider contexts such as arts marketing research. Heritage (2001, p. 45)
emphasises CA is about what people do in conversation rather than the content of what they
say, arguing that it is ‘‘a method for studying social interaction. It is not designed for the
analysis of texts, or of contexts where activities are progressed by means other than social
interaction. Instead it is a method designed to unpack the fundamental organization of social
action and interaction, and in its applied and institutional aspects, to link empirical ?ndings
about the organization of action and interaction to other characteristics of social actors and
the settings they act in.’’ But, while accepting Heritage’s caveat about the proper focus of the
method being on social interaction rather than textual analysis, the author argues that the
interpretive value of CA is actually revealed through the unpacking and linking of people’s
interaction in talk to their other characteristics (such as consumer motivation). CA’s detailed
attention to the strategies of communicative interaction unlocks layers of meaning which
would be unavailable fromstudying textual content alone. As Antaki (n.d.) writes in an online
tutorial about CA, ‘‘What it has accumulated as insights and ?ndings can be brought to bear
on any set of data where language is used in interaction. Its cross-light shows up subtleties
in the terrain which are invisible froma more ‘common-sensical’, straight-down perspective.’’
Ethnomethodology demonstrates how everyday behavior is subject to rules the actors
assume more or less unconsciously. When it comes to behavior involving talk, these rules
cover not only the appropriate arrangement of words through grammar and pronunciation,
but the appropriate social arrangement of speakers through conventions such as turn-taking
in a conversation (i.e. knowing when to start or stop talking so that the conversation can
progress among a number of speakers). CA reveals how speakers’ manipulation of such
rules can achieve particular objectives in communicative interaction alongside the literal
content of the conversation. Events such as interruptions, discontinuities and verbal
patternings establish and sustain hierarchical relations between speakers, which then
create, support and occasionally subvert patterns of meaning in their interaction.
In summary, CA allows researchers to understand conversations (including for the purposes
of this article the special kind of conversations known as qualitative interviews) as
sequences of actions that participants perform to create and manage meaning between
themselves. In particular, CA focuses on how participants in a conversation anticipate and
qualify each other’s semiotic opportunities. Rather than seeing talk as a transparent medium
for the intentional transmission of pre-existing ideas from one speaker to another, CA reveals
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how the organisation of talk generates and disciplines what meanings are possible. Every
utterance in a conversation (or an interview) re?ects prior utterances, and sets the scene for
what can meaningfully follow. As Heritage (1984, p. 242) states, ‘‘the signi?cance of any
speaker’s communicative action is doubly contextual in being both context-shaped and
context-renewing’’ (original italics, cited by Titscher et al., 2000, p. 108). CA understands the
conceptual content of what people say as an ‘‘occasioned phenomenon’’ (Edwards, 1997,
p. 86, italics in original) where position in an interactive sequence drives meaning.
How does (or can) this interaction-occasioned understanding of content apply to interview
data rather than to naturally-occurring conversations? Traditionally conversation analysts
eschew data from experimental procedures or interviews in favor of found data (whether
informal or institutional) such as broadcast interviews, recorded telephone conversations, or
transcripts of therapy sessions (see respectively Wetherell, 2001; Sacks, 1992; Silverman,
1997a). Edwards (1997, p. 89) argues for a more inclusive (and re?exive) approach to what
is acceptable as data. His key principle is that ‘‘[a]ny interactional phenomenon can be
naturalised by treating it as natural’’ (italics in the original). Thus when understood as an
interaction rather than an instrument an interview becomes legitimate data for analysis.
Indeed, CA directs the researcher to ‘‘be interested in what you’ve got’’ (Sacks, 1992, cited
by Edwards, 1997, p. 89) – in other words to start from what the data presents rather than
from predetermined assumptions about what the data should contain or mean. This starting
point opens up fresh possibilities of understanding what interviewdata can offer (in the same
way that ethnography considers the setting of an interview as seriously as its verbal content
(Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995, p. 141)).
Of course such a starting point also problematises the role of the interviewer/researcher if, as
in this project, the same individual carries out both functions. As analyst, one needs to
approach one’s own contribution to the data afresh. Here, interest in what you have got
means interest in a recording and a transcript and approaching these as far as possible
without prejudice; rediscovering and reframing one’s own words spoken in a particular, and
remembered, social, cognitive and affective interactive context. It quickly becomes
apparent that, while lacking the spontaneity of everyday conversation, the interactive
sequence of an interview is far richer, more complex and more unpredictable than merely a
predetermined question prompting an answer, followed by another question. Interviews
draw on the conventions of any verbal social interaction – not only speech itself but pauses,
non-verbal gestures (both visible and audible), intonation, pace, and breathing, to name but
the most immediately obvious. Indeed, one of the most exciting aspects of bringing a CA
perspective to qualitative interview data is the way CA forces the interviewer to confront the
inevitability of interactive structure, revealing the interviewer’s reciprocal role in the
production of meaning with the respondent. Viewed in this light the interviewer becomes less
an objective extractor of ideas and opinions, more a catalyst and collaborator in their
production.
Far from invalidating the resulting data against some chimerical standard of objectivity,
acknowledging the interviewer’s presence in the data promotes a healthy re?exivity in
research, which is peculiarly appropriate to the challenge of understanding arts
consumption. Perhaps more than most sectors, the arts feature producers and marketers
who are themselves steeped in consumption of the product and are committed to
proselytising on the product’s behalf. In turn, complex themes of social distinction and
identity work quite independent of the visible act of attendance at an opera or visit to a
gallery infuse arts marketing (see Gainer, 1995; Slater, 2007). Arts marketing research is thus
even less likely to be a disinterested, allegedly objective process than social research in
general. CA compels the researcher to admit his or her presence in the creation of the data,
with all the richness of meaning, and political complexity, which that entails.
Acknowledging that the interactive detail of an interview occasions the phenomenon of
meaning affords the researcher richer material than would be available from the same data
divorced from the production context. In particular, the subtleties of subjective human
experience, brought into consciousness and articulated within a research interview in ways
which might not occur in any other setting, are inseparable from the verbal context used to
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recall them. This is of clear interest to marketers exploring aesthetic and emotional
experience. The theoretical contribution of this paper is, therefore, to encourage researchers
in the ?eld of arts marketing to make judicious but creative use of an analytical methodology
which, while well-established in other areas of the social sciences (Nielsen and Wagner,
2007), has yet to make an impact on how marketers understand the motivations and
behavior of arts consumers. The very subjectivity, unpredictability and personal emotion
associated with arts experience makes the phenomenological stance of CA a highly
appropriate methodology.
2. Principles of conversation analysis
Phenomenology, from which CA is a methodological descendant, dismisses the idea of an
objective world against which researchers can validate subjective experience. Instead,
phenomenology argues that ‘‘there are no hard facts, only interpretations – that facts are
intersubjectively constructed’’ (Smith, 1998, p. 164). Intersubjectivity – a termSchutz (1967)
coins to describe the way in which individuals are able to participate in each other’s
consciousness of the world through communicative action – is what CA seeks to bring to
light. Performing language in a social context (including the context of a qualitative interview)
is not just a way of reporting experience, but actively (re)constituting experience. As Smith
(1998, p. 164) puts it: ‘‘. . . the act of describing experience actually creates the object of
analysis’’.
CA has a technical vocabulary that names speci?c procedures employed by speakers (or
‘‘members’’ of conversations/society) in conversational interaction. The author names and
explains several of these procedures later in this article in the process of analysing selected
data extracts. But CA has a further set of terms for the ways in which participants
intersubjectively share their consciousness of the world as a result of their interactions. One
such term is ‘‘member categorization devices’’ (MCDs) – the way in which conversation
members establish the identity of that they are referencing. Schegloff (2007, p. 467)
describes MCDs as ‘‘an apparatus’’, consisting of categories (such as opera, theatre or
dance) and collections to which such categories belong (such as performing arts), as well
as rules of application.
How MCDs work can be illustrated by taking a simple verbal sequence such as ‘‘The baby
cried. The mommy picked it up’’ (Sacks, 1972). People immediately understand from the
context that the mommy here is the mother of the child, and that the crying has something to
do with the picking up. But how does this act of identi?cation (or the myriad others which
everyday conversation entails and necessitates) come about? There is no information about
either fact in the story itself. Sacks offers an explanation of what is going on in this kind of
sense-making through the concepts of collections (here the family) and categories (here the
mommy and baby), and the fact that certain types of activity (such as picking up crying
babies) are associated with the behavior expected fromcertain categories – what CA terms
category-bound activities (CBAs). Sacks further points out that interlocutors tend to be
consistent in their ascription of categories to particular collections (hence the mommy/baby
assumption above), and that speakers need only refer to one category characteristic for
others to understand what collection it relates to. Schegloff (2007, p. 471) refers to these
principles respectively as consistency and ef?ciency
This brief account of membership categorisation devices and category-bound activities may
seem somewhat abstract out of context, but the strength of these notions become clear
when conducting detailed analysis of interview data. MCDs and CBAs are particularly
relevant to the subtle ways in which respondents (and interviewers) either acknowledge or
disavow what they see as the behaviors and positions that interview questions imply. In the
case of the project drawn on for this article, such member categories include interviewer,
respondent, web forum (message board) user, audience member, musician, expert,
enthusiast, and so on. Consider the exchange shown in Figure 1, where T is the interviewer
and R the respondent:
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The conventions of transcription for CA may look confusing to readers who are unfamiliar
with them (and the author will be discussing the issue of transcription in more detail later in
this article). The reader may ?nd it useful to consult Extract 1(b) (Figure 2) as a more
traditional form of transcription of the same data and refer back. However in Extract 1(a)
(Figure 1) the transcription conveys enough detail to document a member categorization
device in action. The line numbers provide a convenient reference. The interviewer’s
opening gambit, with the repeated ‘‘you’’ and a self-interruption ‘‘eh’’ ?lled simultaneously
with the response ‘‘yeh’’ from the respondent at line 2 (overlapping speech is marked by
square brackets in this transcription format) displays some tentativeness around linking a
questionnaire response to an occasional behavior (here, being a message board
contributor). The hesitations achieve a position for the interviewer of appearing to be
open to evidence and allowing the respondent to con?rm her behavior. They contribute to
what Potter (1997) calls ‘‘stake inoculation’’ on the part of the interviewer – the disavowal of a
vested interest or motive which might compromise one’s ability to appear authoritative or
persuasive (Wetherell, 2001, p. 21). In this situation the stake is the interviewer’s vested
interest in the convenient (but possibly inappropriate) categorisation of the respondent. The
simultaneous ‘‘yeh’’ from the respondent is a way of managing the continuation of this
tentative opening in a way which con?rms the legitimacy of its development.
Pauses of a ?fth of a second or more in interaction are very noticeable and the transcription
indicates these by a decimal ?gure in brackets. The pause of 0.2 of a second from the
respondent before replying is typical of what CA calls a ‘‘dispreferred’’ response. Refusals,
in general, are dispreferred responses – in other words, they are more troublesome to
speakers than acceptances or agreements. They are usually more awkwardly constructed
(as here) than acceptances, which are a great deal smoother and facilitative of
Figure 1 Extract 1(a)
Figure 2 Extract 1(b)
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conversational ?ow. Usually speakers accompany refusals or denials with verbal formulae
which achieve some kind of mitigation of the disturbance they create. At line 5, the
respondent mitigates her refusal to be categorised as a message board user, following the
pause, by acknowledging that it might have been true of her in the past, but has now ‘‘gone
by the board’’ (an interesting choice of words considering the interviewer’s use of ‘‘board’’ to
denote forum, and perhaps a further gesture of mitigation through appropriating the
interviewer’s vocabulary).
How does this examination of the interactive aspects of what is a very brief piece of data (no
more than six seconds of recording) enhance our understanding of the text it presents? The
member categorisation processes at work include the interviewer’s establishment of a
professional, objective persona for himself, in tension with the natural conversational self,
facing uncertainty and an unfamiliar interlocutor in the context of a telephone interview. The
respondent, anxious not to be categorised inappropriately as a current web forum user
(although this disavowal was not entirely ingenuous according to later material in the
interview) refuses to let the category-bound activity implied in the question ?x her. She is at
pains to position her identity as more complex and ambiguous than the category will allow –
revealing something about her attitude to web forum use which, although not explicit in what
she has to say about her own behavior, is an important and signi?cant backdrop to
understanding it. One of the conclusions from this interview, consistent with others in the
project, is that posting on web forums is something respondents associate with other people
rather than readily acknowledge as part of their own repertoire of behavior, and perhaps also
associate with complex negative feelings.
Heritage (1997) suggests that there are at least two kinds of CA research: ‘‘The ?rst
examines the institution of interaction as an entity in its own right; the second studies the
management of social institutions in interaction’’ (original italics, p. 162, cited by ten Have,
1998, p. 8). As evident from the preceding analysis of Extract 1(a), these two kinds of
research are dif?cult to disentangle in practice. The data present interaction in its own right
(here telephone interviewing), analysis of which leads to an understanding of how the
relative subject positions of researcher and respondent (as social institutions) are ‘‘talked
into being’’ in Heritage’s memorable phrase, around the particular context of the research
question. It is to this question that we will now turn.
3. Research context of the study
The site of the research was the XY Symphony Orchestra (XYSO), a performing arts
organisation with a strong commitment to access, education and audience development.
The organisation’s website embodies this commitment. As well as programme information
and booking facilities, the site hosts podcasts and material directed at inexperienced
concertgoers (such as explanations and audio clips of current repertoire). A web forum for
audience interaction complements the access strategy (topics include ticket pricing,
personal reviews of performances and questions for the performers and staff). But very low
perceived levels of activity have called the web forum’s relevance into question. Is the web
forum contributing to the access strategy in any meaningful sense? Or is it undermining
access by creating an impression of a small coterie of insiders rather than an open forum?
The research project aimed to discover the barriers and incentives to web forum use by
talking to relevant audience members.
The author conducted eight telephone interviews with audience members who had
self-identi?ed as web forum users (though not necessarily active on the XYSO forum). The
number of interviews represents what was feasible within the time and resources available
for the project, and takes into account refusals from, and failures to reach, the full number of
web forum users identi?ed from the recruitment questionnaire. This was an online
questionnaire yielding information about demographic and behavioral characteristics
including web use. The XYSO distributed this via a link embedded in an email newsletter to
regular audience members. Only 16 of the 106 usable responses to the recruitment
instrument indicated web forum use.
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This ?gure (approximately 15 percent of the responses to the recruitment instrument)
suggests that web forum use is a minority activity even amongst audiences habituated to
receiving information online (the sampling frame was an email list). Small sample size is a
characteristic of any attempt to study an emerging phenomenon, but is appropriate
(because of the likelihood of a restricted size data set) for methods of close data analysis.
CA presents itself as an appropriate method in this context.
A potential limitation is that telephone interviewing as a way of exploring motivations for web
forum use may not be congenial to respondents whose preferences evidently include
remote, asynchronous communication. One objection might be that hesitations and
inconsistencies in the interviews result not from, for example, reluctance to be categorised
by implication (as in Extract 1(a) (Figure 1)) but from discomfort with the synchronicity of the
telephone compared to the ability to consider and edit online messages which characterises
web forum use. However, web forums are only one of the many ways in which people
communicate, and (judging from the interviews) represent only a tiny proportion of even the
most dedicated users’ communication activity. Thus the conversational discontinuities so
important to CA as material are far more likely to arise from a struggle to articulate meaning
than from discomfort with the telephone in this study.
4. Examples from the study
Woof?tt (2001, p. 58) admits that it is dif?cult to establish a speci?c set of procedures for
carrying out CA research: ‘‘unlike the set methods for conducting certain kinds of statistical
analyzes, there is no ‘recipe’ for doing conversation analysis’’. However, all CA research
begins with the extremely close scrutiny of data and its detailed formal description. This
leads inevitably to the issue of recording and transcription, already broached in the
preceding discussion of Extract 1(a) (Figure 1). The best-known system of the several CA
uses is that devised by Gail Jefferson in the 1970s (Taylor, 2001). The symbols and format
used enable the user to access details essential to understanding what is going on in an
interaction, in ways which stress the social, embodied nature of language. With a little
practice, they are relatively simple to understand and use.
Comparing a standard transcription to a Jeffersonian transcription provides the most
dramatic illustration of the gain in data from using Jefferson’s system. Continuing the data
already seen in Extract 1(a) (Figure 1), Extract 1(b) (Figure 2) presents the data as it might
appear in a standard transcription. Extract 1(c) (Figure 3) maintains the level of detail begun
in Extract 1(a) (Figure 1). As throughout when quoting data in this article, T is the interviewer,
R the respondent and the author has changed all names (including those of performers).
Extract 1(b) (Figure 2) cleans up the hesitations, false starts, non-verbal utterances and
repetition which we have seen as signi?cant in the same data transcribed as Extract 1(a)
(Figure 1). The interviewer comes across as con?dent rather than tentative, the respondent
as candid and straightforward. Her ?nal statement reads like a clari?cation of consistent and
(froma research point of view) unproblematic behavior. With data having more detail, a more
complex picture emerges (Figure 3).
As already discussed, this respondent is careful to qualify the impression of her use of web
forums not only through explicit disavowal of current involvement, but also through her
pause before responding to the interviewer’s ?rst statement (lines 1-4). The pause lasts 0.2
seconds as shown. The sign (.) as at line 8 represents any noticeable pause of less than 0.2
seconds. The interviewer’s opening statement acts as the ?rst part of what CA terms an
adjacency pair – a sequence of two utterances adjacent to one another in a sequence of
conversation, where the second part is contingent on the ?rst in the way it produces meaning
(Heritage, 1984, Woof?tt, 2001, p. 53). The ?rst part of the adjacency pair here assumes,
albeit tentatively, that the behavior mentioned (contribution to message boards) will be
con?rmed in the response. The pause that follows, and the complexity of the answer, is a
speech act which, as we have seen, the respondent uses to mitigate her rejection of this
assumption.
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This leads, after a false start, to an account of her actual online behavior (focusing on an
international popular singing star rather than the XYSO, and on ‘‘checking up’’ rather than
‘‘contributing’’). The respondent’s choice of words continues her process of quali?cation of
the activity assumed in the interviewer’s opening statement. Note here the offer of a different
term ‘‘what we call a forum’’ for ‘‘online message boards’’ in the subsequent account of her
behavior. The underlining in ‘‘forum’’ indicates emphasis on a word or syllable, here
performing the function of differentiating the word emphatically from the interviewer’s earlier
term and establishing an independent world of meaning over which the respondent is
asserting control.
The overall effect is that of attempted minimisation (‘‘I might er contribute some comment or
something’’) suggesting a studied casualness, associated with ambivalence about
spending time online. This issue of time is given further prominence in the enactment of
the phrase ‘‘ . I’m, I mean I’m more busy these days , ’’ where the chevron marks at either
end of the words denote the acceleration and slowing down of speech relative to adjacent
words it in a transcript.
This transcript reveals many other signi?cant details missing from Extract 1(b), which might
take the researcher in a variety of directions of interpretation: the false starts at lines 8 and 9
where the interviewer and respondent seem unable temporarily to get on each other’s
wavelength (perhaps as a result of the interviewer trying to reassert control of the direction of
the interview); the dog barking at line 15 (intruding the respondent’s actual world of
Figure 3 Extract 1(c)
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distractions and other concerns into the data); and, also at line 15 into 16, the respondent’s
hesitation and then quali?cation of ‘‘webs (mm), on his of?cial website’’ (positioning her as a
discerning and selective user of such resources). Words or letters in brackets like ‘‘(mm)’’
here indicate an unclear fragment in the recording. However, the most important theme
which emerges remains that of ambivalence about time – not having enough time to be a
web forum user, having been one in the past, but nevertheless continuing to be one in the
present (in a selective and discerning way, implying that enough time is available if used
judiciously).
Other respondents echoed this con?icted position regarding time, suggesting time poverty
as a major demotivator from posting on web forums. Another respondent (Figure 4)
emphasised perceived lack of expertise rather than time as a reason for preferring reading
to posting messages.
In spite of being a life-long concertgoer, this respondent was dif?dent about discussing
music either online or face-to-face. Instead he uses reviews and accounts from web forums
(including the XYSO forum) as comparators for his own experiences. His sentence
explaining this (‘‘Err looking at what other people...etc.’’, lines 1-4) takes a three-part list form
familiar in CA (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986). Three-part lists carry a culminative ?nality
(which another speaker often receives as a cue to take the next turn in a conversation). Here
the form achieves an emphatic statement about the general grounds on which one might
evaluate a performance; but a less formal passage where the speaker positions himself as
inexpert about ‘‘the ?ne details’’ (a phrase which recurred in the interview as an index of the
level of expertise of online discussants) follows.
Interestingly, there is some turbulence (i.e. verbal disturbance) accompanying this
contextualisation of the appreciation of a performance in a social milieu. Lines 4-5 feature a
noticeable pause, and a false start and then continuation (known as a ‘‘self-repair’’ in CA, as
opposed to repairs offered by others who correct speakers they hear erring in fact or
terminology) as the respondent talks about the kind of discussion he might have in real life
with concert-going companions. Line 6 features an encouraging interjection from the
interviewer to help manage this awkwardness, followed by the respondent’s attempt to
disavow membership of the category ‘‘fanatic for music’’ within the collection of
concertgoers talking about a performance. The lengthening of the vowel (denoted by the
colon) in line 7 in the inde?nite article ‘‘a:ah’’ enacts his reluctance to be associated with the
Figure 4 Extract 2
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category. The simultaneous laughter from the interviewer and further disavowal of expertise
from the respondent at lines 8 and 9 acknowledge the distinctions of expertise and taste
which are part of the social complexity of musical experience, yet which remain for many an
insidious barrier to its comfortable appropriation.
Allied to the anxieties of time and expertise is the further issue of social risk in online
encounters because of their potential for realisation face to face. Another respondent
(Figure 5) talked about the difference between meeting someone online and then going to a
concert together in the real world (a likely scenario in relation to forums discussing the
performing arts):
The dissonant organisation of language in the extract accentuates the dissonance between
the online and real-life personae. The speaker begins by claiming that people appear ?at
online, but ?ll out when met in real life (lines 1 and 2). Yet the disappointing encounter in
question turns out to be with someone who is much ?atter in real life (‘‘a drunkard and (.)
quite rude actually’’, line 13) than in his ‘‘thought provoking’’ and ‘‘interesting’’ online
persona. Hesitations and repairs are typical of the way in which speakers construct delicate
objects in talk (in this case an individual displaying challenging behavior, which might cast
doubt on the competence of the speaker as judge of character) (Silverman, 1997b). The
interviewer uses laughter (possibly injudiciously) both here (line 10) and in Extract 2 to
smooth a potentially delicate transition about social embarrassment. The respondent also
invokes laughter at line 13 in self-deprecation. The effect is to establish himself as surviving
this ill-judged social encounter with his credentials as a judge of character intact.
The organisation of language in this extract, as much if not more than its literal content,
implies that people perform personalities inconsistently online and of?ine, but also that one
performance has no more claim to ?nal authenticity than another. As with the ?ndings about
time poverty and lack of expertise evident from Extracts 1 and 2, using CA reveals
complexities which enhance the ?ndings about social risk available from the data. The
Figure 5 Extract 3
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enhanced understanding to which the close analysis of the data gives access is not just an
academic point. There are clear practice implications in each of these ?ndings for how arts
organisations might want to manage their online presence more effectively to combat issues
around time, con?dence and risk.
5. Summary and outlook
To conclude, consider two potential objections to CA (the ?rst CA’s disregard for evidence
outwith the data, the second CA’s obsession with form rather than content) and offer a ?nal
commendation of the usefulness of CA to the arts marketing researcher.
CA invites researchers to take the materials of a conversational interaction, rather than
external considerations and presuppositions, as suf?cient to develop an understanding of
what is happening between speakers. Researchers could, however, argue that the
behaviors to which they are paying such close attention have origins outside the immediate
material of the conversations. For example Croft et al. (2007) offer a salutary re?ection on the
gendered nature of communication in any research interview. They argue that groups of men
speak differently from groups of women, men preferring emphatic statements, women
preferring debate (often around emotions). Such differences in behavior, might lead to
interactive phenomena which are less about the immediate circumstances of the interview
(e.g. repairs and turbulence around the construction of delicate objects) and more re?ective
of the gender of the participants (e.g. a female respondent behaving cautiously in
conversation around an emotional subject in a way which suggests consideration of different
aspects of the issue). Certainly, an interviewer, male in this case, needs to be sensitive to the
potentially different meanings which arise fromwhether his interlocutor is behaving as a male
(as in Extracts 2 and 3) or female (as in Extract 1). In fact CA directs the researcher to see
how the interaction constructs maleness or femaleness, a category (man, woman) within a
collection (gender) substantiated by category-bound activities that members understand
and share. The ethnomethodology underlying CA needs to acknowledge local variation
between genders and cultures just as much, say, as between face to face and telephone
interviewing. Indeed CA’s fundamental precept, noted earlier in this article, to ‘‘be interested
in what you’ve got’’ should guide the analyst to discover what rules are implicit in the data in
each case, rather than bringing a ready-made set of assumptions to bear.
A second potential objection to CA is the insistence on analysing interviews as interactions,
rather than as content. To researchers schooled in textual analysis this can seemperverse as
a way of getting more out of qualitative data – a case of determinedly staring at the trees
when the woods are what counts. But the fact is that, for qualitative researchers, interview
data demand detailed attention to both formand content, even though content gets the lion’s
share of attention in most qualitative work. Co-opting techniques from CA, even if a
researcher stops short of the entire epistemological commitment the approach implies, is a
useful corrective and, as this article argues, pays dividends in adding value to interpretation.
In the research project drawn on in this article, as in any other, the researcher constructs a
sample to represent something beyond itself, drawing on resources such as secondary data
to establish the characteristics of the population of interest, choosing a sampling frame and
arriving at a sample of a particular size. Interviews take place with as many cases as can be
reached and will agree. Particularly in ethnographic research, other sources of data may
play an important role in triangulating what is available from the interview and setting the
context, but the interviews are the justi?cation for this triangulation. The data they present are
like a narrow window through which the researcher strains to catch a glimpse of the world
beyond. But, as with the car window Barthes (1973) invokes in his essay on myth, research
attention can be directed at both seeing the surface of the data (looking at the window, rather
like CA looks at the interaction) and looking through the surface (window) to see the
landscape (rather like more traditional approaches to qualitative data analysis).
The problem is that the latter approach can encourage the notion that there is an objective
landscape beyond the window which one could see better were the window larger, or
clearer. In contrast, the phenomenological principle that reality is based in experience rather
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than ?oating independently in some essential and pristine form underlies CA. CA insists that
the window is all researchers have, but that this is suf?cient. Reality is locally produced, in
conversational interaction (or, as here, in interviews), and the researcher needs to attend to
the detail of how this interaction happens in order to understand the way that respondents
construct their worlds.
Using CA is labour intensive, both in terms of basic activities such as transcription, and in
getting to grips with the terminology, assumptions, principles and implications. Finally, then,
why should an arts marketing researcher be troubled to consider using CA? This article
provides some convincing instances of where CA has enriched the interpretation of data in a
particular research context. More generally, by insisting the researcher dismiss
preconceptions about data (hard though it be to avoid hypothesising) and attend to the
interactions that data present, CA encourages that essential research attribute: an open
mind. CA is a corrective to the temptation for the evidence to con?rm one’s prejudices, an
invitation to think differently and to see new and authentic things. With an orientation to how
speci?c individuals make sense of, and share, their contingent realities, CA is peculiarly
appropriate for researching the very precisely situated experiences in which arts patrons
participate.
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Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 39, pp. 441-4.
Potter, J. (1997), ‘ ‘Discourse analysis as a way of analysing naturally-occurring talk’ ’,
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and Yates, S.J. (Eds), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, Sage with the Open University, London,
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Smith, M.J. (1998), Social Science in Question, Sage with the Open University, London.
Taylor, S. (2001), ‘‘Locating and conducting discourse analytic research’’, in Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and
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Further reading
Silverman, D. (2001), Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analysing, Talk, Text and Interaction,
2nd ed., Sage, London.
Taylor, S. (Ed.) (2002), Ethnographic Research: A Reader, Sage Publications with the Open University,
London.
Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and Yates, S.J. (Eds) (2001a), Discourse as Data: A Guide for Analysis, Sage
with the Open University, London.
Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and Yates, S.J. (Eds) (2001b), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, Sage
with the Open University, London.
Corresponding author
Terry O’Sullivan can be contacted at: [email protected]
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doc_765369884.pdf
The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Conversation Analysis methods in arts
marketing research.
International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research
More than words? Conversation analysis in arts marketing research
Terry O'Sullivan
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Hospitality Research, Vol. 4 Iss 1 pp. 20 - 32
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More than words? Conversation analysis in
arts marketing research
Terry O’Sullivan
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of Conversation Analysis methods in arts
marketing research.
Design/methodology/approach – Eight telephone interviews are conducted with members of the
audience of a regional UK symphony orchestra who self-identi?ed as users of online message boards
(‘‘web forums’’). The interviews are transcribed and interpreted using techniques from Conversation
Analysis, an approach to qualitative data analysis which pays close attention to the details of
language-in-use as a form of activity by and between speakers.
Findings – Conversation Analysis-led interpretation suggests that motivations for participation in web
forums are more complex than literal analysis of interview data might reveal. Conversation Analysis’
detailed attention to howcommunicators manage their interaction emphasises the co-production of data
between respondent and interviewer. The manner of emotion and meaning (re)construction through
such exchanges provides valuable cues for researchers in interpreting respondent motivations.
Because of the personalised nature of arts experience, this highly speci?c, context-oriented approach to
understanding respondent meanings offers particular potential to arts marketing researchers.
Research limitations/implications – The use of produced data (interview transcripts) rather than
naturally-occurring data (spontaneous talk) in Conversation Analysis is controversial, but the paper
defends this choice.
Practical implications – Insights from Conversation Analysis enrich the interpretation of interview data
to enhance qualitative research in the arts.
Originality/value – The paper demonstrates the extra value scholars can leverage fromqualitative data
interpretation by Conversation Analysis, and thus adds to an understanding of arts consumers.
Keywords Conversation, Arts, Market research
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction and theoretical contribution
This paper explores and illustrates the use of methods from conversation analysis (CA) in a
speci?c arts marketing research context. Here the context is a research project using
telephone interviews to investigate web forum use by members of the audience of UK
symphony orchestras, but clearly the technique is extendable to many other enquiries
involving qualitative interviewing. The argument of the paper is that the considerable
investment of time and effort involved in using CA can yield worthwhile new perspectives on
data, and thus insights into issues of interest to arts marketers, which might otherwise be
unavailable. This introduction will attempt to de?ne (or at least describe) CA and discuss the
historical context of the development of this method, before arguing the appropriateness of
applying CA to interview data in addition to naturally-occurring data.
CA is one of a number of methods that fall into the general category of discourse analysis, an
approach to social research that looks for patterns in language in use (Taylor, 2001). The
various varieties of discourse analysis share an emphasis on the constitutive and situated
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VOL. 4 NO. 1 2010, pp. 20-32, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1750-6182 DOI 10.1108/17506181011024733
Terry O’Sullivan is a Senior
Lecturer in Management
based at the Open
University Business School,
Milton Keynes, UK.
Received October 2007
Revised June 2008
Accepted June 2008
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nature of language, opposing a commonsense view of language as simply re?ective of
reality, or separate from the social contexts which produce language. The focus of CA is on
social context above all else – in fact the primary concern is to see language as an activity.
Woof?tt (2001, p. 49) de?nes CA as ‘‘a method for the analysis of naturally occurring
interaction’’ – speci?cally, howconversational talk is organised. Conversation in this sense is
a generic term covering any kind of talk, whether informal (such as a group of neighbours
talking about cars) or institutional (such as an encounter between a doctor and a patient, or a
teacher and a class). A group of American sociologists developed CA in the 1960s and
1970s (Harvey Sacks, Gail Jefferson and Emmanuel Shegloff) in order to analyze how
people construct a common-sense social reality through the business of performing
everyday life, in the tradition of Gar?nkel (1967) and ‘‘ethnomethodology’’ (literally ‘‘people
method’’). Ethnomethodology grounds sociological analysis on actual instances of behavior
rather than the more distancing methods of laboratory experiments or researcher-led
accounts. The choice of recorded examples of conversation as data results from the
convenience and accessibility of such data sources, rather than from any intrinsic
commitment to textual data on the part of the researchers. It could be any other form of
observable interactive behavior, but it happens to be conversation because that was what
was available and met the researchers’ needs for close and repeated scrutiny (Woof?tt,
2001, p. 50). A further advantage of this kind of data is that different researchers can
conveniently share and re-analyze the data sets. This tradition continues in the way that
scholars publishing work using CA often make their data recordings available directly online
as well as through transcribed excerpts in printed articles (e.g. Llewellyn, 2008).
It is important to keep the behavioral focus of CA in mind when seeking to apply its
techniques to wider contexts such as arts marketing research. Heritage (2001, p. 45)
emphasises CA is about what people do in conversation rather than the content of what they
say, arguing that it is ‘‘a method for studying social interaction. It is not designed for the
analysis of texts, or of contexts where activities are progressed by means other than social
interaction. Instead it is a method designed to unpack the fundamental organization of social
action and interaction, and in its applied and institutional aspects, to link empirical ?ndings
about the organization of action and interaction to other characteristics of social actors and
the settings they act in.’’ But, while accepting Heritage’s caveat about the proper focus of the
method being on social interaction rather than textual analysis, the author argues that the
interpretive value of CA is actually revealed through the unpacking and linking of people’s
interaction in talk to their other characteristics (such as consumer motivation). CA’s detailed
attention to the strategies of communicative interaction unlocks layers of meaning which
would be unavailable fromstudying textual content alone. As Antaki (n.d.) writes in an online
tutorial about CA, ‘‘What it has accumulated as insights and ?ndings can be brought to bear
on any set of data where language is used in interaction. Its cross-light shows up subtleties
in the terrain which are invisible froma more ‘common-sensical’, straight-down perspective.’’
Ethnomethodology demonstrates how everyday behavior is subject to rules the actors
assume more or less unconsciously. When it comes to behavior involving talk, these rules
cover not only the appropriate arrangement of words through grammar and pronunciation,
but the appropriate social arrangement of speakers through conventions such as turn-taking
in a conversation (i.e. knowing when to start or stop talking so that the conversation can
progress among a number of speakers). CA reveals how speakers’ manipulation of such
rules can achieve particular objectives in communicative interaction alongside the literal
content of the conversation. Events such as interruptions, discontinuities and verbal
patternings establish and sustain hierarchical relations between speakers, which then
create, support and occasionally subvert patterns of meaning in their interaction.
In summary, CA allows researchers to understand conversations (including for the purposes
of this article the special kind of conversations known as qualitative interviews) as
sequences of actions that participants perform to create and manage meaning between
themselves. In particular, CA focuses on how participants in a conversation anticipate and
qualify each other’s semiotic opportunities. Rather than seeing talk as a transparent medium
for the intentional transmission of pre-existing ideas from one speaker to another, CA reveals
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how the organisation of talk generates and disciplines what meanings are possible. Every
utterance in a conversation (or an interview) re?ects prior utterances, and sets the scene for
what can meaningfully follow. As Heritage (1984, p. 242) states, ‘‘the signi?cance of any
speaker’s communicative action is doubly contextual in being both context-shaped and
context-renewing’’ (original italics, cited by Titscher et al., 2000, p. 108). CA understands the
conceptual content of what people say as an ‘‘occasioned phenomenon’’ (Edwards, 1997,
p. 86, italics in original) where position in an interactive sequence drives meaning.
How does (or can) this interaction-occasioned understanding of content apply to interview
data rather than to naturally-occurring conversations? Traditionally conversation analysts
eschew data from experimental procedures or interviews in favor of found data (whether
informal or institutional) such as broadcast interviews, recorded telephone conversations, or
transcripts of therapy sessions (see respectively Wetherell, 2001; Sacks, 1992; Silverman,
1997a). Edwards (1997, p. 89) argues for a more inclusive (and re?exive) approach to what
is acceptable as data. His key principle is that ‘‘[a]ny interactional phenomenon can be
naturalised by treating it as natural’’ (italics in the original). Thus when understood as an
interaction rather than an instrument an interview becomes legitimate data for analysis.
Indeed, CA directs the researcher to ‘‘be interested in what you’ve got’’ (Sacks, 1992, cited
by Edwards, 1997, p. 89) – in other words to start from what the data presents rather than
from predetermined assumptions about what the data should contain or mean. This starting
point opens up fresh possibilities of understanding what interviewdata can offer (in the same
way that ethnography considers the setting of an interview as seriously as its verbal content
(Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995, p. 141)).
Of course such a starting point also problematises the role of the interviewer/researcher if, as
in this project, the same individual carries out both functions. As analyst, one needs to
approach one’s own contribution to the data afresh. Here, interest in what you have got
means interest in a recording and a transcript and approaching these as far as possible
without prejudice; rediscovering and reframing one’s own words spoken in a particular, and
remembered, social, cognitive and affective interactive context. It quickly becomes
apparent that, while lacking the spontaneity of everyday conversation, the interactive
sequence of an interview is far richer, more complex and more unpredictable than merely a
predetermined question prompting an answer, followed by another question. Interviews
draw on the conventions of any verbal social interaction – not only speech itself but pauses,
non-verbal gestures (both visible and audible), intonation, pace, and breathing, to name but
the most immediately obvious. Indeed, one of the most exciting aspects of bringing a CA
perspective to qualitative interview data is the way CA forces the interviewer to confront the
inevitability of interactive structure, revealing the interviewer’s reciprocal role in the
production of meaning with the respondent. Viewed in this light the interviewer becomes less
an objective extractor of ideas and opinions, more a catalyst and collaborator in their
production.
Far from invalidating the resulting data against some chimerical standard of objectivity,
acknowledging the interviewer’s presence in the data promotes a healthy re?exivity in
research, which is peculiarly appropriate to the challenge of understanding arts
consumption. Perhaps more than most sectors, the arts feature producers and marketers
who are themselves steeped in consumption of the product and are committed to
proselytising on the product’s behalf. In turn, complex themes of social distinction and
identity work quite independent of the visible act of attendance at an opera or visit to a
gallery infuse arts marketing (see Gainer, 1995; Slater, 2007). Arts marketing research is thus
even less likely to be a disinterested, allegedly objective process than social research in
general. CA compels the researcher to admit his or her presence in the creation of the data,
with all the richness of meaning, and political complexity, which that entails.
Acknowledging that the interactive detail of an interview occasions the phenomenon of
meaning affords the researcher richer material than would be available from the same data
divorced from the production context. In particular, the subtleties of subjective human
experience, brought into consciousness and articulated within a research interview in ways
which might not occur in any other setting, are inseparable from the verbal context used to
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recall them. This is of clear interest to marketers exploring aesthetic and emotional
experience. The theoretical contribution of this paper is, therefore, to encourage researchers
in the ?eld of arts marketing to make judicious but creative use of an analytical methodology
which, while well-established in other areas of the social sciences (Nielsen and Wagner,
2007), has yet to make an impact on how marketers understand the motivations and
behavior of arts consumers. The very subjectivity, unpredictability and personal emotion
associated with arts experience makes the phenomenological stance of CA a highly
appropriate methodology.
2. Principles of conversation analysis
Phenomenology, from which CA is a methodological descendant, dismisses the idea of an
objective world against which researchers can validate subjective experience. Instead,
phenomenology argues that ‘‘there are no hard facts, only interpretations – that facts are
intersubjectively constructed’’ (Smith, 1998, p. 164). Intersubjectivity – a termSchutz (1967)
coins to describe the way in which individuals are able to participate in each other’s
consciousness of the world through communicative action – is what CA seeks to bring to
light. Performing language in a social context (including the context of a qualitative interview)
is not just a way of reporting experience, but actively (re)constituting experience. As Smith
(1998, p. 164) puts it: ‘‘. . . the act of describing experience actually creates the object of
analysis’’.
CA has a technical vocabulary that names speci?c procedures employed by speakers (or
‘‘members’’ of conversations/society) in conversational interaction. The author names and
explains several of these procedures later in this article in the process of analysing selected
data extracts. But CA has a further set of terms for the ways in which participants
intersubjectively share their consciousness of the world as a result of their interactions. One
such term is ‘‘member categorization devices’’ (MCDs) – the way in which conversation
members establish the identity of that they are referencing. Schegloff (2007, p. 467)
describes MCDs as ‘‘an apparatus’’, consisting of categories (such as opera, theatre or
dance) and collections to which such categories belong (such as performing arts), as well
as rules of application.
How MCDs work can be illustrated by taking a simple verbal sequence such as ‘‘The baby
cried. The mommy picked it up’’ (Sacks, 1972). People immediately understand from the
context that the mommy here is the mother of the child, and that the crying has something to
do with the picking up. But how does this act of identi?cation (or the myriad others which
everyday conversation entails and necessitates) come about? There is no information about
either fact in the story itself. Sacks offers an explanation of what is going on in this kind of
sense-making through the concepts of collections (here the family) and categories (here the
mommy and baby), and the fact that certain types of activity (such as picking up crying
babies) are associated with the behavior expected fromcertain categories – what CA terms
category-bound activities (CBAs). Sacks further points out that interlocutors tend to be
consistent in their ascription of categories to particular collections (hence the mommy/baby
assumption above), and that speakers need only refer to one category characteristic for
others to understand what collection it relates to. Schegloff (2007, p. 471) refers to these
principles respectively as consistency and ef?ciency
This brief account of membership categorisation devices and category-bound activities may
seem somewhat abstract out of context, but the strength of these notions become clear
when conducting detailed analysis of interview data. MCDs and CBAs are particularly
relevant to the subtle ways in which respondents (and interviewers) either acknowledge or
disavow what they see as the behaviors and positions that interview questions imply. In the
case of the project drawn on for this article, such member categories include interviewer,
respondent, web forum (message board) user, audience member, musician, expert,
enthusiast, and so on. Consider the exchange shown in Figure 1, where T is the interviewer
and R the respondent:
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The conventions of transcription for CA may look confusing to readers who are unfamiliar
with them (and the author will be discussing the issue of transcription in more detail later in
this article). The reader may ?nd it useful to consult Extract 1(b) (Figure 2) as a more
traditional form of transcription of the same data and refer back. However in Extract 1(a)
(Figure 1) the transcription conveys enough detail to document a member categorization
device in action. The line numbers provide a convenient reference. The interviewer’s
opening gambit, with the repeated ‘‘you’’ and a self-interruption ‘‘eh’’ ?lled simultaneously
with the response ‘‘yeh’’ from the respondent at line 2 (overlapping speech is marked by
square brackets in this transcription format) displays some tentativeness around linking a
questionnaire response to an occasional behavior (here, being a message board
contributor). The hesitations achieve a position for the interviewer of appearing to be
open to evidence and allowing the respondent to con?rm her behavior. They contribute to
what Potter (1997) calls ‘‘stake inoculation’’ on the part of the interviewer – the disavowal of a
vested interest or motive which might compromise one’s ability to appear authoritative or
persuasive (Wetherell, 2001, p. 21). In this situation the stake is the interviewer’s vested
interest in the convenient (but possibly inappropriate) categorisation of the respondent. The
simultaneous ‘‘yeh’’ from the respondent is a way of managing the continuation of this
tentative opening in a way which con?rms the legitimacy of its development.
Pauses of a ?fth of a second or more in interaction are very noticeable and the transcription
indicates these by a decimal ?gure in brackets. The pause of 0.2 of a second from the
respondent before replying is typical of what CA calls a ‘‘dispreferred’’ response. Refusals,
in general, are dispreferred responses – in other words, they are more troublesome to
speakers than acceptances or agreements. They are usually more awkwardly constructed
(as here) than acceptances, which are a great deal smoother and facilitative of
Figure 1 Extract 1(a)
Figure 2 Extract 1(b)
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conversational ?ow. Usually speakers accompany refusals or denials with verbal formulae
which achieve some kind of mitigation of the disturbance they create. At line 5, the
respondent mitigates her refusal to be categorised as a message board user, following the
pause, by acknowledging that it might have been true of her in the past, but has now ‘‘gone
by the board’’ (an interesting choice of words considering the interviewer’s use of ‘‘board’’ to
denote forum, and perhaps a further gesture of mitigation through appropriating the
interviewer’s vocabulary).
How does this examination of the interactive aspects of what is a very brief piece of data (no
more than six seconds of recording) enhance our understanding of the text it presents? The
member categorisation processes at work include the interviewer’s establishment of a
professional, objective persona for himself, in tension with the natural conversational self,
facing uncertainty and an unfamiliar interlocutor in the context of a telephone interview. The
respondent, anxious not to be categorised inappropriately as a current web forum user
(although this disavowal was not entirely ingenuous according to later material in the
interview) refuses to let the category-bound activity implied in the question ?x her. She is at
pains to position her identity as more complex and ambiguous than the category will allow –
revealing something about her attitude to web forum use which, although not explicit in what
she has to say about her own behavior, is an important and signi?cant backdrop to
understanding it. One of the conclusions from this interview, consistent with others in the
project, is that posting on web forums is something respondents associate with other people
rather than readily acknowledge as part of their own repertoire of behavior, and perhaps also
associate with complex negative feelings.
Heritage (1997) suggests that there are at least two kinds of CA research: ‘‘The ?rst
examines the institution of interaction as an entity in its own right; the second studies the
management of social institutions in interaction’’ (original italics, p. 162, cited by ten Have,
1998, p. 8). As evident from the preceding analysis of Extract 1(a), these two kinds of
research are dif?cult to disentangle in practice. The data present interaction in its own right
(here telephone interviewing), analysis of which leads to an understanding of how the
relative subject positions of researcher and respondent (as social institutions) are ‘‘talked
into being’’ in Heritage’s memorable phrase, around the particular context of the research
question. It is to this question that we will now turn.
3. Research context of the study
The site of the research was the XY Symphony Orchestra (XYSO), a performing arts
organisation with a strong commitment to access, education and audience development.
The organisation’s website embodies this commitment. As well as programme information
and booking facilities, the site hosts podcasts and material directed at inexperienced
concertgoers (such as explanations and audio clips of current repertoire). A web forum for
audience interaction complements the access strategy (topics include ticket pricing,
personal reviews of performances and questions for the performers and staff). But very low
perceived levels of activity have called the web forum’s relevance into question. Is the web
forum contributing to the access strategy in any meaningful sense? Or is it undermining
access by creating an impression of a small coterie of insiders rather than an open forum?
The research project aimed to discover the barriers and incentives to web forum use by
talking to relevant audience members.
The author conducted eight telephone interviews with audience members who had
self-identi?ed as web forum users (though not necessarily active on the XYSO forum). The
number of interviews represents what was feasible within the time and resources available
for the project, and takes into account refusals from, and failures to reach, the full number of
web forum users identi?ed from the recruitment questionnaire. This was an online
questionnaire yielding information about demographic and behavioral characteristics
including web use. The XYSO distributed this via a link embedded in an email newsletter to
regular audience members. Only 16 of the 106 usable responses to the recruitment
instrument indicated web forum use.
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This ?gure (approximately 15 percent of the responses to the recruitment instrument)
suggests that web forum use is a minority activity even amongst audiences habituated to
receiving information online (the sampling frame was an email list). Small sample size is a
characteristic of any attempt to study an emerging phenomenon, but is appropriate
(because of the likelihood of a restricted size data set) for methods of close data analysis.
CA presents itself as an appropriate method in this context.
A potential limitation is that telephone interviewing as a way of exploring motivations for web
forum use may not be congenial to respondents whose preferences evidently include
remote, asynchronous communication. One objection might be that hesitations and
inconsistencies in the interviews result not from, for example, reluctance to be categorised
by implication (as in Extract 1(a) (Figure 1)) but from discomfort with the synchronicity of the
telephone compared to the ability to consider and edit online messages which characterises
web forum use. However, web forums are only one of the many ways in which people
communicate, and (judging from the interviews) represent only a tiny proportion of even the
most dedicated users’ communication activity. Thus the conversational discontinuities so
important to CA as material are far more likely to arise from a struggle to articulate meaning
than from discomfort with the telephone in this study.
4. Examples from the study
Woof?tt (2001, p. 58) admits that it is dif?cult to establish a speci?c set of procedures for
carrying out CA research: ‘‘unlike the set methods for conducting certain kinds of statistical
analyzes, there is no ‘recipe’ for doing conversation analysis’’. However, all CA research
begins with the extremely close scrutiny of data and its detailed formal description. This
leads inevitably to the issue of recording and transcription, already broached in the
preceding discussion of Extract 1(a) (Figure 1). The best-known system of the several CA
uses is that devised by Gail Jefferson in the 1970s (Taylor, 2001). The symbols and format
used enable the user to access details essential to understanding what is going on in an
interaction, in ways which stress the social, embodied nature of language. With a little
practice, they are relatively simple to understand and use.
Comparing a standard transcription to a Jeffersonian transcription provides the most
dramatic illustration of the gain in data from using Jefferson’s system. Continuing the data
already seen in Extract 1(a) (Figure 1), Extract 1(b) (Figure 2) presents the data as it might
appear in a standard transcription. Extract 1(c) (Figure 3) maintains the level of detail begun
in Extract 1(a) (Figure 1). As throughout when quoting data in this article, T is the interviewer,
R the respondent and the author has changed all names (including those of performers).
Extract 1(b) (Figure 2) cleans up the hesitations, false starts, non-verbal utterances and
repetition which we have seen as signi?cant in the same data transcribed as Extract 1(a)
(Figure 1). The interviewer comes across as con?dent rather than tentative, the respondent
as candid and straightforward. Her ?nal statement reads like a clari?cation of consistent and
(froma research point of view) unproblematic behavior. With data having more detail, a more
complex picture emerges (Figure 3).
As already discussed, this respondent is careful to qualify the impression of her use of web
forums not only through explicit disavowal of current involvement, but also through her
pause before responding to the interviewer’s ?rst statement (lines 1-4). The pause lasts 0.2
seconds as shown. The sign (.) as at line 8 represents any noticeable pause of less than 0.2
seconds. The interviewer’s opening statement acts as the ?rst part of what CA terms an
adjacency pair – a sequence of two utterances adjacent to one another in a sequence of
conversation, where the second part is contingent on the ?rst in the way it produces meaning
(Heritage, 1984, Woof?tt, 2001, p. 53). The ?rst part of the adjacency pair here assumes,
albeit tentatively, that the behavior mentioned (contribution to message boards) will be
con?rmed in the response. The pause that follows, and the complexity of the answer, is a
speech act which, as we have seen, the respondent uses to mitigate her rejection of this
assumption.
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This leads, after a false start, to an account of her actual online behavior (focusing on an
international popular singing star rather than the XYSO, and on ‘‘checking up’’ rather than
‘‘contributing’’). The respondent’s choice of words continues her process of quali?cation of
the activity assumed in the interviewer’s opening statement. Note here the offer of a different
term ‘‘what we call a forum’’ for ‘‘online message boards’’ in the subsequent account of her
behavior. The underlining in ‘‘forum’’ indicates emphasis on a word or syllable, here
performing the function of differentiating the word emphatically from the interviewer’s earlier
term and establishing an independent world of meaning over which the respondent is
asserting control.
The overall effect is that of attempted minimisation (‘‘I might er contribute some comment or
something’’) suggesting a studied casualness, associated with ambivalence about
spending time online. This issue of time is given further prominence in the enactment of
the phrase ‘‘ . I’m, I mean I’m more busy these days , ’’ where the chevron marks at either
end of the words denote the acceleration and slowing down of speech relative to adjacent
words it in a transcript.
This transcript reveals many other signi?cant details missing from Extract 1(b), which might
take the researcher in a variety of directions of interpretation: the false starts at lines 8 and 9
where the interviewer and respondent seem unable temporarily to get on each other’s
wavelength (perhaps as a result of the interviewer trying to reassert control of the direction of
the interview); the dog barking at line 15 (intruding the respondent’s actual world of
Figure 3 Extract 1(c)
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distractions and other concerns into the data); and, also at line 15 into 16, the respondent’s
hesitation and then quali?cation of ‘‘webs (mm), on his of?cial website’’ (positioning her as a
discerning and selective user of such resources). Words or letters in brackets like ‘‘(mm)’’
here indicate an unclear fragment in the recording. However, the most important theme
which emerges remains that of ambivalence about time – not having enough time to be a
web forum user, having been one in the past, but nevertheless continuing to be one in the
present (in a selective and discerning way, implying that enough time is available if used
judiciously).
Other respondents echoed this con?icted position regarding time, suggesting time poverty
as a major demotivator from posting on web forums. Another respondent (Figure 4)
emphasised perceived lack of expertise rather than time as a reason for preferring reading
to posting messages.
In spite of being a life-long concertgoer, this respondent was dif?dent about discussing
music either online or face-to-face. Instead he uses reviews and accounts from web forums
(including the XYSO forum) as comparators for his own experiences. His sentence
explaining this (‘‘Err looking at what other people...etc.’’, lines 1-4) takes a three-part list form
familiar in CA (Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986). Three-part lists carry a culminative ?nality
(which another speaker often receives as a cue to take the next turn in a conversation). Here
the form achieves an emphatic statement about the general grounds on which one might
evaluate a performance; but a less formal passage where the speaker positions himself as
inexpert about ‘‘the ?ne details’’ (a phrase which recurred in the interview as an index of the
level of expertise of online discussants) follows.
Interestingly, there is some turbulence (i.e. verbal disturbance) accompanying this
contextualisation of the appreciation of a performance in a social milieu. Lines 4-5 feature a
noticeable pause, and a false start and then continuation (known as a ‘‘self-repair’’ in CA, as
opposed to repairs offered by others who correct speakers they hear erring in fact or
terminology) as the respondent talks about the kind of discussion he might have in real life
with concert-going companions. Line 6 features an encouraging interjection from the
interviewer to help manage this awkwardness, followed by the respondent’s attempt to
disavow membership of the category ‘‘fanatic for music’’ within the collection of
concertgoers talking about a performance. The lengthening of the vowel (denoted by the
colon) in line 7 in the inde?nite article ‘‘a:ah’’ enacts his reluctance to be associated with the
Figure 4 Extract 2
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category. The simultaneous laughter from the interviewer and further disavowal of expertise
from the respondent at lines 8 and 9 acknowledge the distinctions of expertise and taste
which are part of the social complexity of musical experience, yet which remain for many an
insidious barrier to its comfortable appropriation.
Allied to the anxieties of time and expertise is the further issue of social risk in online
encounters because of their potential for realisation face to face. Another respondent
(Figure 5) talked about the difference between meeting someone online and then going to a
concert together in the real world (a likely scenario in relation to forums discussing the
performing arts):
The dissonant organisation of language in the extract accentuates the dissonance between
the online and real-life personae. The speaker begins by claiming that people appear ?at
online, but ?ll out when met in real life (lines 1 and 2). Yet the disappointing encounter in
question turns out to be with someone who is much ?atter in real life (‘‘a drunkard and (.)
quite rude actually’’, line 13) than in his ‘‘thought provoking’’ and ‘‘interesting’’ online
persona. Hesitations and repairs are typical of the way in which speakers construct delicate
objects in talk (in this case an individual displaying challenging behavior, which might cast
doubt on the competence of the speaker as judge of character) (Silverman, 1997b). The
interviewer uses laughter (possibly injudiciously) both here (line 10) and in Extract 2 to
smooth a potentially delicate transition about social embarrassment. The respondent also
invokes laughter at line 13 in self-deprecation. The effect is to establish himself as surviving
this ill-judged social encounter with his credentials as a judge of character intact.
The organisation of language in this extract, as much if not more than its literal content,
implies that people perform personalities inconsistently online and of?ine, but also that one
performance has no more claim to ?nal authenticity than another. As with the ?ndings about
time poverty and lack of expertise evident from Extracts 1 and 2, using CA reveals
complexities which enhance the ?ndings about social risk available from the data. The
Figure 5 Extract 3
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enhanced understanding to which the close analysis of the data gives access is not just an
academic point. There are clear practice implications in each of these ?ndings for how arts
organisations might want to manage their online presence more effectively to combat issues
around time, con?dence and risk.
5. Summary and outlook
To conclude, consider two potential objections to CA (the ?rst CA’s disregard for evidence
outwith the data, the second CA’s obsession with form rather than content) and offer a ?nal
commendation of the usefulness of CA to the arts marketing researcher.
CA invites researchers to take the materials of a conversational interaction, rather than
external considerations and presuppositions, as suf?cient to develop an understanding of
what is happening between speakers. Researchers could, however, argue that the
behaviors to which they are paying such close attention have origins outside the immediate
material of the conversations. For example Croft et al. (2007) offer a salutary re?ection on the
gendered nature of communication in any research interview. They argue that groups of men
speak differently from groups of women, men preferring emphatic statements, women
preferring debate (often around emotions). Such differences in behavior, might lead to
interactive phenomena which are less about the immediate circumstances of the interview
(e.g. repairs and turbulence around the construction of delicate objects) and more re?ective
of the gender of the participants (e.g. a female respondent behaving cautiously in
conversation around an emotional subject in a way which suggests consideration of different
aspects of the issue). Certainly, an interviewer, male in this case, needs to be sensitive to the
potentially different meanings which arise fromwhether his interlocutor is behaving as a male
(as in Extracts 2 and 3) or female (as in Extract 1). In fact CA directs the researcher to see
how the interaction constructs maleness or femaleness, a category (man, woman) within a
collection (gender) substantiated by category-bound activities that members understand
and share. The ethnomethodology underlying CA needs to acknowledge local variation
between genders and cultures just as much, say, as between face to face and telephone
interviewing. Indeed CA’s fundamental precept, noted earlier in this article, to ‘‘be interested
in what you’ve got’’ should guide the analyst to discover what rules are implicit in the data in
each case, rather than bringing a ready-made set of assumptions to bear.
A second potential objection to CA is the insistence on analysing interviews as interactions,
rather than as content. To researchers schooled in textual analysis this can seemperverse as
a way of getting more out of qualitative data – a case of determinedly staring at the trees
when the woods are what counts. But the fact is that, for qualitative researchers, interview
data demand detailed attention to both formand content, even though content gets the lion’s
share of attention in most qualitative work. Co-opting techniques from CA, even if a
researcher stops short of the entire epistemological commitment the approach implies, is a
useful corrective and, as this article argues, pays dividends in adding value to interpretation.
In the research project drawn on in this article, as in any other, the researcher constructs a
sample to represent something beyond itself, drawing on resources such as secondary data
to establish the characteristics of the population of interest, choosing a sampling frame and
arriving at a sample of a particular size. Interviews take place with as many cases as can be
reached and will agree. Particularly in ethnographic research, other sources of data may
play an important role in triangulating what is available from the interview and setting the
context, but the interviews are the justi?cation for this triangulation. The data they present are
like a narrow window through which the researcher strains to catch a glimpse of the world
beyond. But, as with the car window Barthes (1973) invokes in his essay on myth, research
attention can be directed at both seeing the surface of the data (looking at the window, rather
like CA looks at the interaction) and looking through the surface (window) to see the
landscape (rather like more traditional approaches to qualitative data analysis).
The problem is that the latter approach can encourage the notion that there is an objective
landscape beyond the window which one could see better were the window larger, or
clearer. In contrast, the phenomenological principle that reality is based in experience rather
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than ?oating independently in some essential and pristine form underlies CA. CA insists that
the window is all researchers have, but that this is suf?cient. Reality is locally produced, in
conversational interaction (or, as here, in interviews), and the researcher needs to attend to
the detail of how this interaction happens in order to understand the way that respondents
construct their worlds.
Using CA is labour intensive, both in terms of basic activities such as transcription, and in
getting to grips with the terminology, assumptions, principles and implications. Finally, then,
why should an arts marketing researcher be troubled to consider using CA? This article
provides some convincing instances of where CA has enriched the interpretation of data in a
particular research context. More generally, by insisting the researcher dismiss
preconceptions about data (hard though it be to avoid hypothesising) and attend to the
interactions that data present, CA encourages that essential research attribute: an open
mind. CA is a corrective to the temptation for the evidence to con?rm one’s prejudices, an
invitation to think differently and to see new and authentic things. With an orientation to how
speci?c individuals make sense of, and share, their contingent realities, CA is peculiarly
appropriate for researching the very precisely situated experiences in which arts patrons
participate.
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Wetherell, M., Taylor, S. and Yates, S.J. (Eds) (2001b), Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, Sage
with the Open University, London.
Corresponding author
Terry O’Sullivan can be contacted at: [email protected]
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