conversationanalytic

Conversation analysis (CA) is a methodological and theoretical approach in the social sciences that studies how social order is produced and maintained through everyday talk. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s from the work of Harold Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson within ethnomethodology, with the aim of describing how participants organize their speaking and understanding in interaction.

CA relies on recordings of naturally occurring conversations across diverse settings, such as gatherings, interviews, classrooms, and workplace interactions. Analysts produce detailed transcripts using specialized conventions to represent timing, intonation, pauses, overlaps, and other facets of talk. The analysis proceeds by close, sequential examination of how utterances function as social actions within the ongoing talk.

Core concepts in CA include turn-taking systems that minimize gaps and overlaps, adjacency pairs (such as question–answer sequences), and sequence organization that ties together actions like offering, accepting, or resisting. Researchers study repair practices to anticipate and fix communication problems, and they examine how preference organization shapes responses. The work pays particular attention to how meanings arise in interaction rather than from isolated utterances, and to how social norms and institutional contexts shape talk.

CA has been applied across fields such as education, medicine, law, organizational studies, media, and online communication. Its emphasis on empirical, micro-level analysis distinguishes it from broader theories of language and interaction, though it is often combined with other qualitative methods. Critics note limitations in generalizability, heavy transcription demands, and challenges extending findings to non-ordinary or digitally mediated interactions.