Embeddedness and sequentiality in social media

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion of work around social media within CSCW. A range of perspectives have been applied to the use of social media, which we characterise as aggregate, actor-focussed or a combination. We outline the opportunities for a perspective informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA)—an orientation that has been influential within CSCW, yet has only rarely been applied to social media use. EMCA approaches can complement existing perspectives through articulating how social media is embedded in the everyday lives of its users and how sequentiality of social media use organises this embeddedness. We draw on a corpus of screen and ambient audio recordings of mobile device use to show how EMCA research is generative for understanding social media through concepts such as adjacency pairs, sequential context, turn allocation / speaker selection, and repair

Repetition and the prosody-pragmatics interface

Repetition poses certain problems for pragmatics, as evidenced by Sperber and Wilson’s claim that ‘‘the effects of repetition on utterance interpretation are by no means constant’’. This is particularly apposite when we examine repetitions produced in naturally occurring talk. As part of an ongoing study of how phonetics relates to the dynamic evolution of meaning within the sequential organisation of talk-in-interaction, we present a detailed phonetic and pragmatic analysis of a particular kind of self- repetition. The practice of repetition we are concerned with exhibits a range of forms: ‘‘have another go tomorrow . . . have another go tomorrow’’, ‘‘it might do . . . it might do’’, ‘‘it’s a shame . . . it’s a shame’’. The approach we adopt emphasises the necessity of exploring participants’ displayed understandings of pragmatic inferences and attempts not to prejudge the relevance of phonetic (prosodic) parameters. The analysis reveals that speakers draw on a range of phonetic features, including tempo and loudness as well as pitch, in designing these repetitions. The pragmatic function of repetitions designed in this way is to close sequences of talk. Our findings raise a number of theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the prosody– pragmatics interface and participants’ understanding of naturally occurring discourse

Negotiating pain: the joint construction of a child's bodily sensation

Traditional theories of socialisation, in which the child was viewed as a passive subject of external influences, are increasingly being rejected in favour of a new sociology of childhood which frames the child as a social actor. This article demonstrates the way in which conversation analysis can reveal children's agency in the micro-detail of naturally occurring episodes in which children express bodily sensations and pain in everyday life. Based on 71 video-recordings of mealtimes with five families, each with two children under 10 years old, the analysis focuses on the components of children's expressions of bodily sensation (including pain), the character of parents’ responses and the nature of the subsequent talk. The findings provide further evidence that children are social actors, active in constructing, accepting and resisting the nature of their physical experience and pain. A conversation analysis of ordinary family talk facilitates a description of how a child's agency is built, maintained or resisted through the interactional practices participants employ to display knowledge

Delaying dispreferred responses in English: From a Japanese perspective

This article employs conversation analysis to explore the interpenetration of grammar and preference organization in English conversation in comparison with a previous study for Japanese. Whereas varying the word order of major syntactic elements is a vital grammatical resource in Japanese for accomplishing the potentially universal task of delaying dispreferred responses to a range of first actions, it is found to have limited utility in English. A search for alternative operations and devices that conversationalists deploy for this objective in English points to several grammatical constructions that can be tailored to maximize the delay of dispreferred responses. These include the fronting of relatively mobile, syntactically ?non-obligatory? elements of clause structure and the employment of various copular constructions. A close interdependence is observed between the rudimentary grammatical resources available in the two languages and the types of operations that are respectively enlisted for the implementation of the organization of preference

Miscommunication in Doctor-Patient Communication

The effectiveness of medical treatment depends on the quality of the patient–clinician relationship. It has been proposed that this depends on the extent to which the patient and clinician build a shared understanding of illness and treatment. Here, we use the tools of conversation analysis (CA) to explore this idea in the context of psychiatric consultations. The CA “repair” framework provides an analysis of the processes people use to deal with problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. These problems are especially critical in the treatment of psychosis where patients and health care professionals need to communicate about the disputed meaning of hallucinations and delusion. Patients do not feel understood, they are frequently non‐adherent with treatment, and many have poor outcomes. We present an overview of two studies focusing on the role of repair as a mechanism for producing and clarifying meaning in psychiatrist–patient communication and its association with treatment outcomes. The first study shows patient clarification or repair of psychiatrists’ talk is associated with better patient adherence to treatment. The second study shows that training which emphasizes the importance of building an understanding of patients’ psychotic experiences increases psychiatrists’ self‐repair. We propose that psychiatrists are working harder to make their talk understandable and acceptable to the patient by taking the patient's perspective into account. We conclude that these findings provide evidence that repair is an important mechanism for building shared understanding in doctor–patient communication and contributes to better therapeutic relationships and treatment adherence. The conversation analytic account of repair is currently the most sophisticated empirical model for analyzing how people construct shared meaning and understanding. Repair appears to reflect greater commitment to and engagement in communication and improve both the quality and outcomes of communication. Reducing potential miscommunication between psychiatrists and their patients with psychosis is a low‐cost means of enhancing treatment from both the psychiatrist and patient perspective. Given that misunderstanding and miscommunication are particularly problematic in psychosis, this is critical for improving the longer term outcomes of treatment for these patients who often have poor relationships with psychiatrists and health care services more widely

'I'm not X, I just want Y': formulating 'wants' in interaction

This article provides a conversation analytic description of a two-part structure, ‘I don’t want X, I want/just want Y’. Drawing on a corpus of recordings of family mealtimes and television documentary data, I show how speakers use the structure in two recurrent environments. First, speakers may use the structure to reject a proposal regarding their actions made by an interlocutor. Second, speakers may deliver the structure following a co-interactant’s formulation of their actions or motivations. Both uses decrease the likelihood of challenge in third-turn position. When responding to multi-unit turns speakers routinely deal with the last item first. The value of ‘I want Y’ is to formulate an alternative sense of agency which undermines the preceding turn and shifts the trajectory of the ongoing sequence. The article contributes to work in discursive psychology as I show how speakers may formulate their ‘wants’ in the service of sequentially unfolding social interaction

Effect of questions used by psychiatrists on therapeutic alliance and adherence

Background Psychiatrists' questions are the mechanism for achieving clinical objectives and managing the formation of a therapeutic alliance – consistently associated with patient adherence. No research has examined the nature of this relationship and the different practices used in psychiatry. Questions are typically defined in binary terms (e.g. ‘open’ v. ‘closed’) that may have limited application in practice. Aims To undertake a detailed examination of the types of questions psychiatrists ask patients and explore their association with the therapeutic alliance and patient adherence. Method A coding protocol was developed to classify questions from 134 out-patient consultations, predominantly by syntactic form. Bivariate correlations with measures of patient adherence and the therapeutic alliance (psychiatrist-rated) were examined and assessed using generalised estimating equations, adjusting for patient symptoms, psychiatrist identity and amount of speech. Results Psychiatrists used only four of ten question types regularly: yes/no auxiliary questions, ‘wh-’ questions, declarative questions and tag questions. Only declarative questions predicted better adherence and perceptions of the therapeutic relationship. Conversely, ‘wh-’ questions – associated with positive symptoms – predicted poorer perceptions of the therapeutic relationship. Declarative questions were frequently used to propose an understanding of patients' experiences, in particular their emotional salience for the patient. Conclusions A refined defining of questioning practices is necessary to improve communication in psychiatry. The use of declarative questions may enhance alliance and adherence, or index their manifestation in talk, e.g. better mutual understanding. The function of ‘so’-prefaced declaratives, also used in psychotherapy, is more nuanced than negatively connotated ‘leading’ questions. Hearable as displays of empathy, they attend closely to patient experience, while balancing the tasks of assessment and treatment

Figures of speech : figurative expressions and the management of topic transition in conversation

In conversation, speakers occasionally use figurative expressions such as “had a good innings,” “take with a pinch of salt,” or “come to the end of her tether.” This article investigates WHERE in conversation such expressions are used, in terms of their sequential distribution. One clear distributional pattern is found: Figurative expressions occur regularly in topic transition sequences, and specifically in the turn where a topic is summarized, thereby initiating the closing of a topic. The paper discusses some of the distinctive features of the topic termination/transition sequences with which figurative closings are associated, particularly participants' orientation to their moving to new topics. Finally, the interactional use of figurative expressions is considered in the context of instances where their use fails to secure topical closure, manifesting some conflict (disaffiliation, etc.) between the participants

Coordinating talk and practical action: The case of hair salon service assessments

This paper investigates how talk and practical action are coordinated during one type of activity involving professional communication: the service-­assessment sequence in hair salons. During this activity, a practical inspection of the haircut must be coupled with sequentially produced verbal acts. Our analysis of four examples reveals that there is no fixed relationship between the organization of talk and practical action. Instead, people manipulate this relationship on a moment-by-moment basis, often coordinating the two into a single, integral package, or relying on one stream of action to achieve progress in the other. These findings imply that some multimodal activities that are brought into alignment may have their own, separate and independent procedural logic and sequencing patterns and that these can be brought into play to create or deal with constraints in each other

Co-constructing intersubjectivity with artificial conversational agents: people are more likely to initiate repairs of misunderstandings with agents represented as human

This article explores whether people more frequently attempt to repair misunderstandings when speaking to an artificial conversational agent if it is represented as fully human. Interactants in dyadic conversations with an agent (the chat bot Cleverbot) spoke to either a text screen interface (agent's responses shown on a screen) or a human body interface (agent's responses vocalized by a human speech shadower via the echoborg method) and were either informed or not informed prior to interlocution that their interlocutor's responses would be agent-generated. Results show that an interactant is less likely to initiate repairs when an agent-interlocutor communicates via a text screen interface as well as when they explicitly know their interlocutor's words to be agent-generated. That is to say, people demonstrate the most “intersubjective effort” toward establishing common ground when they engage an agent under the same social psychological conditions as face-to-face human-human interaction (i.e., when they both encounter another human body and assume that they are speaking to an autonomously-communicating person). This article's methodology presents a novel means of benchmarking intersubjectivity and intersubjective effort in human-agent interaction