Qualitative researchers have an increasing number of digital resources to help them organise their data. Here, Charlotte Albury and Tilly Flint offer a guide to NVivo, a popular and flexible tool for working with focus group data – and one that can be made to work for conversation analysts.
Lockdown in many countries has affected the way in which healthcare workers interact with their patients. In the UK, for example, a number of medical consultations have gone online, with doctors trying to deal with their patients over Zoom or Skype – and it has not been easy. Lucas Seuren has been working in Oxford in a team actively exploring the costs and benefits of online medical consultation, and I’m delighted that he has agreed to send in a report from the front line.
Lucas Seuren, Oxford University
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed the organisation of healthcare services. Social distancing protocols mean that face-to-face contact between patients and health care professionals has to be limited as much as possible. Consultations are now mostly conducted by telephone or video. This provides a unique opportunity for EMCA research on healthcare interaction, but also a significant challenge. Little is still known about how communication works in these remote service models, and as experts on social interaction, we are in a prime position to develop evidence-based guidance. The problem is: how do we get data when we cannot go to places where the interaction take place? Continue reading
I imagine that many interaction researchers will have been curious about how a voice-activated internet-connected device might be integrated (or not) into conversations at home. Martin Porcheron along with Stuart Reeves, Joel Fischer and Sarah Sharples (all at the University of Nottingham) went the next step, and did the research. Here Martin and Stuart explain how the research was done…
Martin Porcheron
Stuart Reeves
Voice-based ‘smartspeaker’ products, such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod have become popular consumer items in the last year or two. These devices are designed for use in the home, and offer a kind of interaction where users may talk to an anthropomorphised ‘intelligent personal assistant’ which responds to things like questions and instructions. Continue reading
How good are your video records? One angle? Two? Wide-angle? Was the camera static or did you move to catch things – and miss other things? How good was the sound? All of us have occasionally been frustrated with what we find on the screen when we come to analyse it, but Jacob Davidsen and Paul McIlvenny have some more fundamental concerns. Just how “big” should data be?
Paul McIlvenny (l.) and Jacob Davidsen
Research on Language and Social Interaction - Blog 