Chapter 1 provides an overview of screen time concerns reported in the media and research, with consideration of relevant learning and interaction theories which indicate that face-to-face social interaction, talk and play are essential for the linguistic and cognitive development of children. This chapter also revisits the fundamental multimodality of face-to-face interaction. The shift from face-to-face to online multimodal interaction therefore requires users to make complex linguistic and interactional adaptations to be able to achieve understanding and affiliation with interlocutors in online contexts, as occurred with the advent of the telephone. This is especially true of the most common form of online interaction, text chat, which is a unique hybrid form of social written interaction, with its own specific affordances and constraints for children’s social and linguistic development. This chapter presents key interactional differences between face-to-face and written online interaction, based on conversational resources available (or unavailable) to users in either setting, including videogame settings. This discussion provides a necessary basis for investigation of children’s written interaction in subsequent chapters.

This chapter provides an overview of methods for data collection in Conversation Analysis and practical advice on collecting interactional data. We touch on several recurrent issues that researchers encounter in the process. These issues include accessing data; the use of existing data (including user-uploaded, like YouTube); navigating gatekeepers in accessing a setting; building trust with members of a setting; building ethnographic understanding of activities under examination; obtaining ethical approvals; protecting privacy of participants; methods and materials for informed consent (including with populations with diminished capacities); devising a recording schedule; deciding when/how often to record; selecting the right quantity and type of recording equipment; considerations of spatial and audio environments; the use of alternative technologies for recording; recording mediated interactions; procedures and check-lists for before recording; positioning and framing the camera; when to press record and when to press stop; navigating the presence of the researcher-recorder on site; and gathering supplementary documentation from the setting.

This chapter describes and empirically illustrates an approach to analyzing categorial phenomena in talk-in-interaction, grounded in the distinctive conversation analytic practice of building and analyzing collections. We begin by outlining a core set of observations made by Harvey Sacks in implementing a shift from conventional social scientific treatments of categories (e.g., gender, race, sexuality, age) as analysts’ resources, to instead examining them as members’ resources. That is, instead of using categories to study the social world, Sacks’ approach introduced resources for seeing how participants in social interactions use and self-administer categories. We then present an analysis of a collection of openings of interactions from ordinary conversational and institutional settings, considering some ways in which participants explicitly and tacitly use and manage categories in the initial moments of these interactions. Using this analysis as an exemplar, we address a set of challenges and critiques associated with conversation analytic research on categories. We thereby describe how CA can provide an empirically rigorous means of examining the ‘mutually constitutive’ relationship between categories and other ‘generic’ interactional structures and practices – and thus for analyzing the situated (re)production of categories, from the most mundane to those most strongly associated with distributions of power and privilege.

The growing interest in Conversation Analysis (CA) from the wider academic world, and the use of CA in contexts beyond academia, is largely due to the effective communication of CA findings. This chapter focuses on how to effectively communicate CA findings to non-CA professionals, such as healthcare professionals, academics, teachers, the police, politicians, and beyond. When training professionals in CA findings, careful considerations need to be made to make our findings welcome, whilst at the same time preserving the detail and nuances of human interaction. Decisions about the selection and length of representative extracts, together with decisions about the central messages being conveyed, require careful consideration. Challenges and tensions can arise when making these decisions including, managing the issue of (a) the professionals’ expertise, (b) avoiding negative self- and other evaluations, (c) how to present the data without getting lost in the detail; and (d) addressing concerns about generalizability and quantification. This chapter will address these possible tensions and offer guidance and practical solutions regarding the decisions that are made to effectively train non-CA professionals.

The investigation of singular practices and actions is the bedrock of Conversation Analysis (CA), yet it is not the only approach that CA research can take. This chapter poses a series of analytic questions designed to guide the analyst’s attention towards a complementary mode of analysis, one which takes as its object of study not a singular practice but rather a system of practices, alternative solutions to a recurrent problem of social organization. While this approach has been employed to greatest effect in research on generic organizations of interaction, the analytic techniques are themselves generic and applicable across domains of action. Rather than select a practice or action and ask what forms it can take or what environments it can inhabit, conversation analysts can instead select a problem, an exigency of social interaction, and ask how participants solve it. Alternative practices and actions naturally cluster around the organizational problems to which they serve as possible solutions, and it is this endogenous organization that CA research aims to document. The chapter sketches out and illustrates a range of analytic techniques that conversation analysts have employed in past research and can employ again to discover and investigate organizations of practice.

While the preceding chapters of the Handbook have focused on practical skills in CA research methods, this chapter looks towards the path ahead. A diverse group of conversation analysts were asked to outline possible projects, point readers toward un- or under-described interactional phenomena, and discuss persistent issues in the field. The contributions address future advances in data collection, specific interactional practices, the complex interplay between language and the body, and cross-cultural and crosslinguistic comparisons, among other issues. The chapter concludes with a concise reiteration of the bedrock principle that underpins all CA research methods.

This chapter is written for conversation analysts and is methodological. It discusses, in a step-by-step fashion, how to code practices of action (e.g., particles, gaze orientation) and/or social actions (e.g., inviting, information seeking) for purposes of their statistical association in ways that respect conversation-analytic (CA) principles (e.g., the prioritization of social action, the importance of sequential position, order at all points, the relevance of codes to participants). As such, this chapter focuses on coding as part of engaging in basic CA and advancing its findings, for example as a tool of both discovery and proof (e.g., regarding action formation and sequential implicature). While not its main focus, this chapter should also be useful to analysts seeking to associate interactional variables with demographic, social-psychological, and/or institutional-outcome variables. The chapter’s advice is grounded in case studies of published CA research utilizing coding and statistics (e.g., those of Gail Jefferson, Charles Goodwin, and the present author). These case studies are elaborated by discussions of cautions when creating code categories, inter-rater reliability, the maintenance of a codebook, and the validity of statistical association itself. Both misperceptions and limitations of coding are addressed.

Conversation-analytic (CA) research projects have begun to involve the collection of interaction data in laboratory settings, as opposed to field settings, not for the purpose of experimentation, but in order to systematically analyze interactional phenomena that are elusive, not in the sense of being rare (i.e., ‘seldom occurring’), but in the sense of not being reliably or validly detected by analysts in the field using relatively standard recording equipment. This chapter (1) describes two, CA, methodological mandates – ‘maintaining mundane realism’ and ‘capturing the entirety of settings’ features’ – and their tensions; (2) provides four examples of elusive phenomena that expose these tensions, including gaze orientation, blinking, phonetic features during overlapping talk, and inhaling; and (3) discusses analytic ramifications of elusive phenomena, and provides a resultant series of data collection recommendations for both field and lab settings.

The study of epistemic issues in conversation focuses on the knowledge claims that interactants assert, contest, and defend in turns at talk and sequences of interaction. Epistemic issues permeate all the topics that conversation analysts study and are central to ‘recipient design’ – the ways in which speakers design their talk to accommodate the specifics of the context and the particular others who are their interlocutors. However, the study of epistemics is complicated by the fact that CA methodology permits the attribution of subjective knowledge to participants as a part of the analytic process only if the attribution is grounded in the data of interaction. While this stipulation has tended to inhibit research on epistemics in the past, the development of the notion of epistemic stance has enabled researchers to focus on how persons present themselves as more or less knowledgeable, and have those claims upheld or contested by others. This chapter identifies and illustrates seven sources of evidence that can be used, separately and in combination, to ground analytical claims about epistemic stance and status in conversational interaction. The analysis of epistemics is shown to have deep continuities with general conversation analytic procedures used across the field.

Conversations involving people with communication disorders or other forms of communicative impairment, such as those with dementia, autism, aphasia, or hearing impairment, differ in systematic ways from typical conversations (i.e., those involving participants without significant communicative or cognitive challenges). Drawing from CA work over the last few decades, this chapter discusses methodological issues involved in data collection in this field and in the transcription and analysis of these types of data. Analysis of the ways in which these interactions are distinctive and ‘atypical’ as regards social actions and the practices used in their construction and deployment involves a form of comparative analysis drawing on CA findings concerning typical interaction. The chapter also discusses other, more explicit, forms of comparative analysis regularly undertaken in this field, including comparison of participants’ conversations over time, and the comparison of how conversations involving participants with one type of communicative impairment compare with those of participants with a different form of impairment. One way in which the latter type of investigation can be developed is discussed in relation to a certain interactional feature – here, interruptive, other-initiation of repair – and how it may be traced across conversations involving participants with different communicative impairments.

Social interaction is inescapably multimodal, composed of talk (e.g., lexical items, syntax, prosody), nonlexical conduct (e.g., breathing, laughter, sighing, response cries), and solely visible (or embodied) conduct (e.g., body posture and movement, hand gestures, object manipulation). While this chapter concerns the transcription of social interaction, its primary goal is not to explain transcription conventions and instruct readers how to use them (these topics are dealt with secondarily). Rather, the primary goal of this chapter is to demonstrate the analytic necessity and usefulness of systematic and detailed transcription practices, including those for both vocal and visual conduct (e.g., systems developed by Gail Jefferson and Lorenza Mondada, respectively). We achieve this goal by applying a wide range of transcription practices to a single video clip of mundane, dinner-time English conversation, illustrating how transcription both is, and contributes to, an analytic process. We discuss practical difficulties associated with transcription, especially that of visual conduct. Ultimately, we show that transcription is essential to understanding topics such as turn-taking, sequentiality, (dis)affiliation, emotion, stance, and social action itself.

Limited communicative resources due to dementia-related memory problems can be consequential for opportunities to claim epistemic rights and initiate and pursue communicative projects for persons living with dementia. This conversation analytic case study of a video-recorded homecare visit between Koki and his homecare nurse focuses on an extended negotiation concerning a factual disagreement related to a practical problem. The study explores how Koki manages to mobilize remaining communicative resources for initiating and pursuing a topical agenda, as well as how the caregiver recognizes and supports these initiatives. The analysis describes how a person with dementia manages to influence the course of action and, in collaboration with the interlocutor, succeeds in achieving two interrelated projects, one being within an epistemic domain and the other within a deontic domain. Koki’s persistent use of first actions, with repeated and upgraded knowledge claims, as well as embodied and verbal displays of a practical problem, contributes to influencing both the topical agenda and action agenda. The analysis shows how an attentive interlocutor may collaborate in identifying a practical problem and finding a solution to it, and thereby assist the person with dementia in taking control over his everyday life despite limited communicative resources.

In this introductory chapter, we provide a brief overview of some of the main topics related to dementia communication research that are addressed by the different chapters in this edited volume: Dementia and Diagnostics, Dementia and Conversational Strategies, Dementia and Epistemics, and Communicative Challenges in Everyday Social Life. One of the central aims of this volume is to shed more light on how persons with dementia accomplish relevant goals in interaction and also how changes in an individual’s discursive abilities may impact how conversationalists negotiate a world in common and continue to build their social relationships. All contributions for this edited volume draw on the methods of Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach to social interaction that provides a detailed view of the moment-by-moment accomplishment of social life. By exploring interactional practices through the lens of CA, this volume seeks to explore interactions involving people with dementia in a variety of contexts (everyday and institutional), pointing to both the interactional difficulties that often arise, but also the creativity and collaboration within these interactional encounters. A summary of each of the volume’s chapters is also provided.

This chapter explores how differing expectations and experiences manifest in diagnostic interactions in the memory clinic. We do this by microanalysing communication in dementia diagnosis feedback meetings, focusing on instances of misalignment between doctors and the person living with dementia. We examine three videos from a dataset of 101 recordings from two areas in the UK, collected as part of the ShareD study. We present different interactional contexts where the person receiving a dementia diagnosis choose to align or misalign with the doctors’ interactional projects of diagnosis delivery, prescribing medication and recommending support. Examination of these instances suggests that misalignment between the assessment of symptoms may, at least in part, reflect interactional facework in the face of dementia as a challenge to self-identity.

Singing may be a relative strength for people with dementia, yet little is known of how individuals leverage it as a communicative resource in everyday interaction. This study analyzes how Dan, a man living with vascular dementia, modifies lyrics based on prior talk and the physical environment during interactions with his wife, Morgan. Using Conversation Analysis, I describe the emergent structure of his singing and what it accomplishes. Dan uses singing to do a range of interactional jobs (such as complimenting, complaining, and requesting), and his lyrics are susceptible to evaluation based on their construction and relevance to previous talk. Both participants treat his singing as humorous and creative wordplay, but the laughability of his singing is contingent on how he modifies the formulaic lyrics based on the current discursive context. Thus, singing is a way in which Dan situationally constructs himself as a funny, clever, and sociable person. Dan’s singing also indirectly indexes his close relationship with Morgan by assuming her shared musical knowledge. This analysis contributes to the study of identity construction by people with dementia, the understanding of how people adapt to changes in cognition, and the study of the structure and function of singing in everyday interaction.

In this chapter we use conversation analysis to analyse the use of tag questions by co-participants of people with dementia. Tag questions can function as a ‘current speaker selects next’ technique. They also prefer, and hence put interactional pressure on, the next speaker to produce a response that aligns with the tag-formatted turn. We examine three classes of co-participant-produced tag-formatted actions and analyse how their use is recipient-designed for people with dementia. Tag-formatted assertions and assessments present information that the person with dementia has already been told or might be expected to know, while simultaneously acknowledging that this information is, or should be, within the recipient’s epistemic domain. By eliciting agreement, they co-opt the person with dementia into the co-construction of this topical talk. Tag-formatted challenges are produced in response to an inappropriate turn by the person with dementia and, as well as challenging/complaining about that turn, act to elicit from the person with dementia an acknowledgement of its inappropriacy. We then show how tag questions are used to induce verbal acquiescence to a suggested activity. We discuss how these tag questions encroach into the person with dementia’s territories of knowledge, power and interactional competence, highlighting asymmetries between the person with dementia and the co-participant in these domains.

Chapter 2 delves into the intricate interactional dynamics of administering cognitive assessments, with a focus on the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-III (ACE-III). The chapter critically examines the standardisation challenges faced by clinicians in specialised memory assessment services, highlighting the nuanced reasons for non-standardized practices. While cognitive assessments play a pivotal role in diagnosing cognitive impairments, the study questions the assumed standardization of the testing process. Drawing on Conversation Analysis (CA), the authors analyse 40 video-recordings of the ACE-III being administered in clinical practice to reveal variations from standardized procedures. The chapter expands on earlier findings to show how clinicians employ recipient-design strategies during the assessment. It introduces new analyses of practitioner utterances in the third turn, suggesting deviations could be associated with practitioners’ working diagnoses. The chapter contends that non-standard administration is a nuanced response to the interactional and social challenges inherent in cognitive assessments. It argues that clinicians navigate a delicate balance between adhering to standardized procedures and tailoring interactions to individual patient needs, highlighting the complex interplay between clinical demands and recipient design. Ultimately, the chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding the social nature of cognitive assessments and provides insights into the valuable reasons for non-standardized practices in clinical settings.

This chapter uses conversation analysis to investigate how different quiz formats facilitate or impede participation in group quizzes for people living with dementia. Quizzes are an important way to prompt social interaction and engage people living with dementia. However, their reliance on memory and cognition can present difficulties for staff and players alike. Despite quizzes being based on a question–answer format, the way they are enacted can vary in the following ways: question formulation and type; the type of appropriate answer (i.e., is there one, or more than one, possible correct answer?); the social structure of the quiz (Is the quiz played in teams or individually? Do players self-select to answer or do so in a mediated turn allocation format?); the way the players are spatially organised. All these variations impact the degree to which players can engage with the activity and with one another. Through the examination of different types of quiz format, this chapter outlines and make recommendations for quiz structures which facilitate high participation and uptake, and low threats to face. Data are taken from a corpus of ten quizzes recorded in four different group settings in England.

Chapter 12 explores the relationship between cognition and interaction. The longitudinal study, spanning over two years, utilises Conversation Analysis (CA) to investigate the cognitive and interactional abilities of a person with Alzheimer’s disease, ‘May’, through 70 audio recordings of telephone conversations with family members. The chapter acknowledges a close relationship between language and cognition by examining how memory and memory loss are displayed in verbal conduct over time. Furthermore, the chapter sets out to challenge the deficit-focused perspective pervasive in dementia literature, showcasing how May employs sophisticated communicative strategies and transacts routinised practices of interaction even with more advancing dementia. The findings suggest a nuanced understanding of cognitive abilities in dementia, questioning the binary framework of competence versus incompetence in analysing complex cognitive issues and interactional events. The findings contribute to understanding the complexities of Alzheimer’s disease, emphasising the need for tailored communication strategies to enhance the quality of interactions for individuals and their family’s facing dementia. The chapter underscores the significance of using interaction as a window to cognition, offering insights into the degenerative consequences of Alzheimer’s and paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of cognitive decline in the context of family communication.