An Appeal for a Methodological Fusion of Conversation Analysis and Experimental Psychology

ABSTRACT

Human social interaction is studied by researchers in conversation analysis (CA) and psychology, but the dominant methodologies within these two disciplines are very different. Analyzing methodological differences in relation to major developments in the philosophy of science, we suggest that a central difference is that psychologists tend to follow Popper’s falsificationism in dissociating the context of discovery and the context of justification. In CA, following Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, these two contexts are much closer to one another, if not inextricable. While this dissociation allows the psychologist a much larger theoretical freedom, because psychologists “only” need to validate their theories by generating confirmed predictions from experiments, it also carries the risk of generating theories that are less robust and pertinent to everyday interaction than the body of knowledge accumulated by CA. However, as long as key philosophical differences are well understood, it is not an inherently bad idea to generate predictions from theories and use quantitative and experimental methods to test them. It is both desirable and achievable to find a synthesis between methodologies that combines their strengths and avoids their weaknesses. We discuss a number of challenges that would need to be met and some opportunities that may arise from creating such a synthesis.

Funding

Saul Albert’s work was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Media and Arts Technology Programme, a Research Councils UK Centre for Doctoral Training (EP/G03723X/1).

Notes

¹ As our aim is not to discuss how the epistemic territory of the study of social interaction is divided up between different psychological subdisciplines, we simply note here that interaction has been addressed predominantly, but not exclusively, by psycholinguists, social psychologists, and cognitive psychologists.

² Although qualitative and antirealist approaches offer many critical alternatives and nuances, the dominant standards of evidence across many subfields of psychology are based on formal coding, experimental methods, and quantitative analysis (Toomela, 2014).

³ See, e.g., Fodor (1991).

⁴ Hume (1738–40/1888, p. 89) did not actually use the word induction but suggested we should be skeptical about the way “instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience.”

⁵ A bridging assumption suggests that normatively appropriate contextual factors can be reliably inferred to uphold the causal connections between an observable fact and its ostensible meanings (Matsui, 2000, pp. 93–94). Garfinkel warned that—if used inappropriately in studies of human action—these assumptions could allow problems of induction to creep back into the causal explanations supported by an otherwise rigorous experiment.

⁶ Schegloff (1968) famously describes collecting up to 500 cases of telephone call openings, and his key finding about the sequential order of ringing and greeting exchanges hinges on the detailed explication of a single “deviant case.”

⁷ Kahneman’s open letter can be found at http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.6716.1349271308!/suppinfoFile/Kahneman%20Letter.pdf.

⁸ This is a problem narrowly related to the famous “Quine-Duhem Thesis” (see Harding, 2012).

⁹ Potter and Hepburn (2012) outline a similar approach to using CA methods to study interview settings as a way of interactionally grounding the research questions of survey studies common in qualitative sociology and social psychology.

Additional information

Funding

Saul Albert’s work was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Media and Arts Technology Programme, a Research Councils UK Centre for Doctoral Training (EP/G03723X/1).