A peek at conversational analysis

Conversational analysis (or more broadly, discourse analysis) is a research strategy used in the naturalistic study of communication, in which talk is studied as a phenomenon in its own right. The micro‐investigation of everyday communication patterns in natural settings, including the explication of the everyday participant's understanding, is a first step toward amassing detailed and critical knowledge of the intricate processes at work in talk. A later step is the construction of theory grounded in this accumulated data. Talk data is collected through participant‐observation techniques, and analyzed through interpretation by participants, observers, or the researcher.