On Apr 12, 2006, at 8:56 PM, Bonnie Nardi wrote:
My student has been interviewing people about how they perceive themselves. The context is an audio recorded interview about personal topics. So turn taking is not so relevant (I don't think). The interviewee has the floor.
This is absolutely a turn-taking situation. If the interviewee didn't answer at all, we would all consider that bizarre. Why? Because we all appear to abide by rules which hold that when someone uses their turn to ask us a question, we should take a turn to respond. Indeed, the assumption that we abide by these rules is so great that we are never allowed to be seen as not responding--even our silence will be interpreted as a (usually if not always negative) response. Indeed, your student has only noticed these hesitancies as notable because of the turn-taking rules that govern most of our interactions, and specifically the rule prohibiting gaps and overlaps of turns. Were there no turn-taking rule prohibiting gaps in the taking of turns, there would be no possibility for the notion of hesitations, or at least no noticing of them in situations like interviews, conversations, etc. (BTW, the notion of a floor is completely bound up with the notion of a turn. Indeed, it is so much so that, I would argue, most interaction researchers have confused one with the other. Even Carol Edelsky, who tried to separate the concepts, wound up adding to the confusion in some ways.)
What the student has noticed is that some statements are delivered very directly and easily, while in other cases, the interviewee searches for words, hesitates, etc. Is there rigorous nalysis of what such hesitations might mean?
Yes. The paper by Pomerantz cited earlier indicates that, at least in certain interactional contexts, hesitations and non-responses can signal that the (non)responder is reluctant to produce the response because it is dispreferred. (Here's where the paper by Sacks comes in--he notes that we prefer to agree, and make nice in conversations. So, when we can't be, for whatever reason, we mark that through things like hesitations.) (BTW, a lot of doctrinaire CAists would object to how I just put all of this--they'd say I've psychologized the notion of dispreference, and they're against that kind of thing. But I think Sacks paper leads directly to that, and I think he's right.)
Or any pointers on how to interpret repeated words, etc. For example, the interviewee might say, "I, I, I am different online [in various ways].
Again, it depends on the interactional situation, but if you have visual data, you may be able to examine your videotapes with Chuck Goodwin's analysis of such repeats in hand. (Charles Goodwin, 1981, Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.) He found that people often repeat when their interlocutors are not gazing at them. Perhaps your student was looking down at his/her interview sheet or notes while the interviewee began to speak? You'd have to look at the data to show this.
I think the issue is more one of articulating less thought out commentary. I know there are analyses that suggest hesitations may indicate shading the truth (as the interviewee sees it), etc. I don't remember where I've seen those.
There is a deep tendency to psychologize when considering interactional phenomenon. So, there are plenty of researchers who have sought to claim that hesitancies are a sign of cognitive difficulty, whether due to the inabilities of the speaker or the difficulty of the topic or extra cognitive work the speaker is engaging in because they are trying to cook up a lie or some such thing. This requires unnecessary speculation about what is in the black box of our brains. Further, it relies on an assumption about our capacity to interact that conversation analysts have repeatedly shown is extremely suspect--the assumption that our capacity for interaction is fragile and easily overpowered by certain difficulties/challenges. --Christian Nelson