DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY – ACADEMIC YEAR ...

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY – ACADEMIC YEAR 2008/9
Title Page for 2nd & 3rd year Essays/Assignments
NAME: ABBIE-JANE VALE
Registration No: 0631736
Module Code and Name: SC213 Social Psychology
Class Teacher: Hiroko Tanka
Title of Essay: Discuss Goffman’s approach to the study of social interaction and compare and contrast the methodological concerns of conversation analysis/ethnomethodology.
Course and year: Sociology BA 3rd year
Submission Date: 27th April 2009


Discuss Goffman’s approach to the study of social interaction and compare and contrast the methodological concerns of conversation analysis/ethnomethodology.
2,000 words
In this essay I will discuss the contemporary discipline of conversation analysis before examining the theoretical contributions Ervin Goffman made through The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1956) and Face Work (1967). I will then consider the methodological shift from Goffman's theoretical foundations and Garfinkel's ethnomethodology through exploring the contemporary work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson.
Conversation analysis is an approach to the study of social interaction that focuses on practices of speaking that recur across a variety of contexts and settings. It argues that conversation has its own dynamic structure and rules. It looks at the methods used by speakers to structure conversation efficiently. Conversation analysis (CA) emerged as a distinct discipline based predominantly on the work of Harvey Sacks in the 1960s; however, the sociological origins of this discipline can be traced in the work of its originators: firstly, the interactionist (qualitative) approach of Ervin Goffman and secondly, ethnomethodology, inspired by Harold Garfinkel. Goffman’s approach influence can be seen in the work of Harvey Sacks and Jefferson and Garfinkel’s approach influenced the work of Schegloff.
CA has developed into a successful, disciplined and technical method of analysis of ‘talk-in-interaction’. CA studies the organization of conversation such as the way people take turns and what turn-types there are. Features such as turns and sequence; openings and closings; adjacency pairs; preference structures; and repair are analysed. Turn taking is described as “a process by which interactants allocate the right or obligation to participate in an interactional activity. (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974, p.88) Repair is described as “The mechanisms through which certain "troubles" in interaction are dealt with”. (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977, p.88) Furthermore prefrence organization is described by Pomerantz (1984) as “The ways through which different types of social actions ('preferred' vs. 'dispreferred') are carried out sequentially”. (p.89) A sequence is a unit of conversation that consists of two or more and adjacent functionally ...