Hello,
This week I want to ask a question from the readings and than share what I have about my study so far. I know patterns are important in a conversation. Turn-takings, laughs, pauses et. are all important. Actually, while I was reading, a question came up to my mind. I am not a native speaker. I am coming from a different culture. If I conduct an interview from another culture, how can I make sure that I am correctly interpreting the patterns special to another culture? For example, it is very difficult for me to interpret what they actually mean when someone laughs. I mean some people are more serious when they speak while some other was adding some fun into their speaking. I respect all people, but as a researcher I don't know how to solve this issue. This is my question for this week.
In terms of my own work, I am working on a 32 minutes interview that I conducted last year for my study. Actually, I conducted 5 interviews, but for this class I wanted to select one of them for analysis. Basically, I am trying to explore how an instructor who teaches online decides on tools and assignments when developing online teaching environment. This is a single case study. The instructors' decision on tools and assignments is identified as "instrumental judgment" by Nelson and Stolterman (2003). I am not still sure whether to look at all types of design judgments or the only instrumental judgment, which is my first challenge for now. The other one is that the interviewee is much more talking than me. I am wondering if this is a problem. Finally, I am not sure what to implement in my study, discourse analysis, discursive psychology, or just conversation analysis, and how to implement them. This is important because I should put them into my presentation. Briefly, I am not sure where to start. I completed Jeffersonian transcription including pauses, laughs, turn-taking, overlaps, intonations, and emphasizes. I think that will be great to have a meeting with you regularly until my presentation.
Thanks,
Hi Remzi,
ReplyDeleteYou raise some good questions here. I'm going to respond to two that I see as key, but please email me if I overlook something!
First, if you are conducting an interview in a different "culture" would you also be carrying it out in a "different language"? If so, it is quite common for the interpretation to occur within the original language and then the transcription to eventually include a translation. This is in order to account for the uniqueness that is central to a given language. Does this get at your question?
In regards to knowing what approach to discourse analysis you want to employ, you can certainly use the data session as a space to actually invite others to give you feedback on this. You don't have to know exactly the approach you will take. In fact, you can invite others to help you make sense of a useful approach in relationship to your research focus and interests.