‘Spin a web with conversation analysis at the centre’

Held annually in Loughborough by the Discourse and Rhetoric Group, 'CA Day' celebrates Conversation Analysis. But as something of a regular attendee now, I'm starting to see the 'CA' as 'Commonplace Alchemy' – finding the gold in the everyday. If you've ever sat in a parents' evening at your child's school and thought 'there's a lot going on in this exchange, someone should do a study on it', this is the conference for you.

This year's event showcased so much more than the overlooked in the minutiae of what we say. The room was buzzing with the interdisciplinary, psychologists rubbing shoulders (and eating CAke!) with sociologists, linguists, geographers and more. And the presentations were genuinely mixed-method, with Dr Charlotte Albury (University of Oxford) making the central point of the day for me: 'If you're working in CA and looking to make applied change in whatever field you're in, perhaps consider spinning a web with CA at the centre.'

Behaviour change, Albury said, comes down to conversations between healthcare professionals and their patients. Yet her upcoming systematic review around primary care clinicians suggests that very little (if any) guidance is based on evidence from real communications. Doctors may be told to use an 'Ask, Advise, Act' structure in their brief interventions, but research suggests they don't really do it.

If you're setting out to address clinically relevant problems, Albury argued, multiple methods are needed to make change. You need various 'intertwining threads', a range of evidence of what 'works' (and why) in order to convince people to make changes. Different parts of your web need to be mobilised to reach different intended audiences.

As an example, Albury explained how she and colleagues looked at how doctors present weight loss treatment to patients: as 'bad news', neutrally, or as 'good news' – a positive opportunity for lifestyle change. They looked at 246 consultations: 62 delivered as good news, 82 as bad news, 102 neutral. Patients who received 'good' news were more likely to agree to attend the referral than patients who received neutral news. 'I'd done the CA,' said Albury, 'I could hear them agreeing enthusiastically'. But what actually happened next? 'I added a statistician into my web,' Albury said. Looking a year down the line, presenting weight loss treatment as a positive opportunity was indeed associated with greater uptake of treatment and greater weight loss.

So CA had played its part – 'current methods were not fine-tuned enough to pick up the important bits of conversation', Albury said. But she was not done yet. Having already asked members of the public and doctors what actions they thought were important, the co-design continued, working with Design Science to produce online training in a form that doctors would actually do. 'We were leaning into what we were told by all these different groups helping us to design.' For example, images were designed with and by people living with obesity; and dancers, a poet and a composer were all 'drawn into the web' to help with disseminating to different audiences. For me, it was all such a great example of how psychologists can and do work – yes, the data is at the heart of it, with Albury saying 'people really cared that this was underpinned by research'. But the web of science can be so creative, strong and beautiful.

Dances of disagreement

Back to that parents' evening, then, with Giorgia Pellegrino (Università di Bologna) on 'Reported speech as a resource for doing more than agreeing in parent-teacher conferences'. Many of you will have sat in these, including the new online versions where you get a strict five minutes on Zoom. They can be tricky for the teacher, who has to evaluate the child and give a negative assessment if needed, but at the same time build a partnership with the parents. And they can be tricky for the parents, who may feel they have to defend their child to the hilt, or throw them under the bus.

Studying 104 video-recorded parent-teacher conferences, Pelligrino showed how parents tend to agree and affiliate with the teacher's statements, while also performing an 'upgrading of epistemic position' – often, bringing up something from home life that the teacher wouldn't have known. They may report a dialogue with their child, which can serve to modulate agreement, and distribute responsibility. 'By voicing their child and at the same time distancing themselves from them, they do "vicarious blaming" of the teachers, while they [also] work to show affiliation with them.' I need to remember the second bit of that sentence…

Pelligrino described some of her clips as showing 'cautious and implicit ways to introduce some forms of disaffiliation'. Less cautious and implicit disaffiliation was to be found in several other talks.  

Jamie Arathoon (York St John University) demonstrated how assistance dog handlers and taxi drivers negotiate taxi access. Sadly, 81 per cent of guide dog handlers say they have experienced an 'access denial', and Arathoon's PhD research is around the emotional labour of how access is denied, and how the refusal is negotiated. Unfortunately, with Uber drivers, that seems to involve a pretty flat 'It's my car mate'. Arathoon demonstrated how agency and responsibility gets placed on the denied person, and while they said 'talk is what is available to the visually impaired person in these interactions', you have to hope that the law will more frequently step up to assist.

Other talks included Virginia Calabria (University of Oxford) on 'The negotiation of shushables in interaction', identifying the point at which taboos emerge in group discussions. Julie Wilkes (independent researcher) used recordings of 10 closed peer support group meetings for 'Kinship Carers', to show how disagreements are handled around birth parents' use of social media related to the young person. Content on Facebook, for example, can be problematic in these situations: it is persistent, searchable, replicable. 'I opened a book up and says look I've printed it off – it's there,' said one participant in the peer support group. 'And she still tried to deny it.'

More happily, in 'The phonetics of laughing in conversation', Richard Ogden and Marina Cantarutti (University of York) played various song-like, snort-like, or grunt-like laughs, plus one festive 'ho ho ho'. There is huge variation in rhythm, loudness and duration, and that 'phonetic richness' is doing work in conversation. Although there isn't the linguistic structure which we use for turn-taking as we talk, laughter bouts do have beginnings, middles and ends – which participants can recognise. There's a rhythm and a melody, for example in loudness / quietness, and in the sequence of 'initiating pulse, exhalation sequence, glottal reset, inhalation', which all allows us to transition smoothly out of laughing together to one person speaking.

'Just asking questions'

Moving from the personal to the political, three talks considered the links between beliefs, talk, and political action.

Lotte van Burgsteden, Hedwig te Molder (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Geoffrey Raymond (University of California, Santa Barbara) introduced me to 'The Overton Window'. There are various aspects of society, including opinions, values and customs, which are subject to different levels of legitimacy: considered to be 'legitimate', 'marginal', or 'beyond the pale'. Sometimes, in conversation, you may feel you have made an unquestionable claim, and then someone expresses their doubt or skepticism. What do you do?

In a clip from a Dutch talk show, Tim Douwsma, a Dutch singer, protested against Covid-19 measures. The original speaker is now in a 'catch-22 situation': they can treat the questions as genuine, which would give Tim the material he needs to continue his skepticism, or treat it as exploitative, which in turn leave them susceptible to the defence of 'I'm just asking questions' as a 'concerned father' and a 'concerned citizen' (which is indeed what happened). Similarly, in an exchange in the Dutch parliament, Voort portrayed Faber's questions as invalid – 'I find that remarkable that we are having our debate over scientifically established norms… [this could] create discord, lead to polarisation' – and Faber was able to respond 'Is asking for information casting doubt then? I can just ask that right? Why could that not be asked?' Such conversational gambits are, van Burgsteden said, a 'way to weaponise doubt and escape the Overton Window, to introduce and normalise extreme positions.'

Also considering extreme positions was Geoffrey Raymond (University of California, Santa Barbara) with an entertaining look at 'Reality disjunctures in news comedy interviews'. We saw how Jordan Klepper from The Daily Show pulls the conversational rug out from underneath Trump supporters and Covid deniers, using 'preference organisation' – the way people usually speak and respond – to elicit discredited responses. Faced with a woman saying 'I believe him and the military are runnin the country and that idiot [Biden] that's up there is a puppet and Obama's in the basement tellin him what to do', Klepper responds 'That sounds so crazy, it's probably not true', prompting agreement which is probably based on the expectation of the usual form, 'that sounds so crazy it's probably true'. Use of 'smile voice' swerves the idea that her statement is provocative to him.

Raymond added insight on context, categorisation and action, which were also to the fore in Eric Laurier and Shawn Bodden's talk on the 2021 Capitol Riot and how it ended. The Edinburgh University geographers pointed out that most of the research on trouble in public spaces is around how riots start, whereas CA work is often interested in closures and endings. Through video clips (some of them now blocked online), we saw how people could swap from speaking for themselves to speaking to and for the crowd. 'There's this sense of it being a wild party,' Laurier said: 'how do we end it?'

'What next' was a collective concern for the crowd. Alternative proposals were put forward: 'we're staying', the minor rebellion of 'let's stay out a little past six' (the Covid curfew), 'at least make one more point'. There was 'collective argumentative accomplishment', in 'we've made our point', 'you've got to pick your battles', and 'we broke the glass' – in fact, as Laurier pointed out, the rather 'Trumpian formulation 'beautifully broken glass'. There was 'moral categorisation', in 'Don't be like Antifa'.

Again, it was fascinating to note the threads at play here: starting with the geographical, of a crowd impacted by the public space and being a physical thing with a front, back, middle, edges, that you can turn towards or away from. 'Just sitting down can do the work of positioning a person from an individual to a social group. Then there's the physical and embodied: 'there was lots of touch within the crowd'. And at the heart of it all, the conversational work in how collective action and caring can be negotiated through our words.

Starship Robots

I'll end with this one, partly because Stuart Reeves (University of Nottingham) said himself that it was about 'bodies not talk'. But also because I think it says something important about Psychology, and Psychology conferences.

If you live in Milton Keynes or Northampton, 'autonomous delivery robots' will be a common sight on your street. So maybe you wouldn't bat an eyelid. Maybe you wouldn't find yourself in an online conference thinking 'I'm watching videos of a box trundling along a path'. Maybe you wouldn't find it quite amusing to think of Reeves (with Hannah Pelikan and Marina Cantarutti) using one of two methods, namely 'intentional' ('we create orders and follow robots to destinations') or 'opportunistic' ('we go to a hub and then we just follow it'). But I don't live in Milton Keynes or Northampton.

Reeves played various examples of passes, near misses, intersecting paths. He compared how people respond to these Starship Robots with how we might respond to a lone walker (e.g. a group may expect a lone walker to walk around them… not if it's a robot). He highlighted the potential conflict between 'machinic rules' and 'the work to make robots fit into the street environment', saying that this is only going to become more important as public robotics expands. He said things like 'What's interesting is how close people get to this thing' and 'their inscrutability a key feature'. And he left me thinking 'Only on CA Day, only at a truly interdisciplinary Psychology conference'. And isn't that the best place to be, at the centre of a weird and wonderful web?