Conversation Analysis and the Study of Sociohistorical Change

ABSTRACT

We reflect on the affordances and challenges of interactional data in the analysis of long-term institutional change. To this end we draw on our studies of direct encounters between journalists and politicians in news interviews and presidential news conferences and in particular the use of question design as a window into the evolution of journalistic norms and press-state relations over time and the causal antecedents of such change. All analyses that incorporate a concern with environing contexts of interactional change impose certain burdens of empirical demonstration on the researcher. Here we consider three analytic issues that arise in the kind of historical-institutional analysis we have been pursuing: (a) controlling for the situational context, (b) pinpointing the locus of change, and (c) validating indicators of change. Data are in English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Because all data in the news interview and presidential news conference projects are a matter of public record, their use poses no human subjects or other ethical concerns.

² Emic validation, and its utility for the development of coding systems and quantification, is discussed in the next section.

³ For a fuller discussion of the coding framework, see Clayman et al. (2006).

⁴ The proportional odds assumption is that the coefficients that describe the relationship between, say, the lowest versus all higher categories of a variable are the same as those that describe the relationship between the next-lowest category and all higher categories, etc.