Guest Blog: The Media from Inside: 4 weeks at the British Medical Journal

As social scientists, we have findings which should be communicated more broadly than just in the academic journals, and university press officers are keen to get us to engage with the media. But what do the media want? This fascinating blog by Anna Volkmer gives us an insight, as she reports on her four weeks behind the scenes at the BMJ, the hugely influential publication read by medical practitioners in the UK and beyond.

Anna Volkmer, University College London

I’ve often wondered what our university press officer wanted from me when she said “what’s the hook?”. I had approached her asking if my research might be interesting to any media or news outlets. I genuinely wasn’t sure. I had kind of anticipated that she would write “the hook”. Having undertaken a placement at the British Medical Journal (the BMJ) I now have a much better understanding of how to pitch an idea. And it needs to be done in one sentence.

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Guest Blog: Using multimodality CA in interviewing complainants with Intellectual Disabilities

How does the criminal justice system in England and Wales accommodate witnesses or defendants who have difficulty with language? Only within the last twenty years has much thought been given to vulnerable people who struggle to understand and communicate, especially in unfamiliar settings. Now, the system does recruit help, and I’m delighted to invite Tina Pereira, trained in conversation analysis, to explain how she uses multimodality CA to help all parties cope with the demands of police interviews, enabling them to deliver ‘best evidence’.  

Tina Pereira, The Intermediary Co-operative

Reader of this blog will hardly need reminding that human communication in everyday contexts is typically multimodal, and that embodied conduct i.e. interactions that includes physical objects, gesture, as well as spoken language, typically impart meaning in a communicative encounter. So it may surprise some that those latter channels have, until recently, been largely underplayed in the criminal justice system, which, traditionally, privileges text and speech. Think of legal documents, police interviews and the to-and-fro of the courtroom.

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Guest Blog: 93% of all misinformation is nonverbal: How a zombie statistic came and stayed

Students of language all too often have to sigh and turn away when they hear yet another expert claim that 75% – or is it 85%? Or 93%? – of communication is via body language. Where does this zombie stat come from, and why won’t it go away? I’m delighted that Gonen Dori-Hacohen has taken on the job of tracking it down, and it makes for some fascinating reading.

Gonen Dori-Hacohen, U Mass., Amherst

“Although some have suggested that as much as 93% of conversational meaning is communicated nonverbally (Mehrabian, 1968), more conservative estimates indicate that nonverbal behaviors account for 60 to 65% of the meaning conveyed in an interpersonal exchange (Birdwhistell, 1970; Burgoon, 1994). That is, even conservative estimates ascribe nearly twice as much meaning-making power to nonverbal communication as to verbal—and it is not difficult to understand why, given the number of nonverbal channels and the range of nonverbal behaviors to which people have access.” (Guerrero & Floyd, 2006, p. 2)

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Guest blog: Challenges creating a dataset of police calls for conversation analytic research

CA researchers who approach institutions like the police can get responses which vary from warm encouragement to outright rejection, with most cases falling somewhere in between. It’s up to the researcher to establish good relations with their contacts, abide by their requirements, and be sensitive to the legal and technical constraints that box in the recordings. But if they do come away with usable data, that can be an exceptionally valuable source of information about how the police work. Here, Emma Tennent reports on the process by which she and Ann Weatherall found the data they used in their recent ROLSI paper on person reference in police calls.

Emma Tennent, Wellington

How do the police deal with people who call in for help?  

Ann Weatherall and I wanted to study what barriers people faced in calling police emergency and non-emergency lines about gendered violence. But the New Zealand police had never previously released call-recordings for research. The process of getting permission was a long one, with much to learn on the way; but we succeeded, and we’re delighted to have our first article based on that data published in ROLSI. We hope that this description of the process might help as a guide to the kind of ups and downs this kind of applied research involves.

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Guest Blog: Creating a state-of-the-art-review: The art is in the collaboration    

A recent issue of the journal features eight specially commissioned articles describing the state of play in CA research on medical attraction. The contributors covered the ground from accident and emergency to palliative care, and everything in between. But doing a really solid job on identifying the state of the art is no easy matter, and I’m delighted that one of the contributors, Catherine Woods has given us an account of the work involved.

Catherine Woods, Oxford

In 2022 Becky Barnes and I were meeting on Teams once a month to discuss ongoing papers from the most recent project we worked on together. We often met on a Friday afternoon to discuss goals and writing, but only if we both managed to clear our main work and meetings for the week. Funnily enough, when there is a promise of talking about all things CA with a colleague you enjoy working with and just before the weekend, you always work efficiently during that week.

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A new bibliography of all articles in ROLSI, 1987-2022

Back in 2015, Maurice Nevile tracked down and listed every single article published in ROLSI between 1987 and 2014. That was an enormous feat of scholarship, and now he’s updated the catalogue.

Maurice Nevile, University of Canberra

Now Maurice’s 2023 revised version of the bibliography presents, in chronological order, all items published in the journal ROLSI, from 1987 to 2022 (excluding editor comments).

The list makes it easier to view the journal’s contents at a glance, or to track and find specific items, authors, analytic interests and phenomena, settings and situations, or data languages, etc. The list begins in 1987, when the journal changed its name and orientation, after starting in 1969 as Papers in Linguistics.

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Guest Blog: Writing “Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in Motion”

There’s an increasing demand for Conversation Analysis texts as the discipline becomes established, and new markets emerge among students and researchers. One of the most intriguing texts to come out soon is Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis in Motion: Emerging Methods and New Technologies, edited by a group based at Oulu University. I’m delighted that the group have written a piece for the blog.

L to R: Antti Kamunen, Pentti Haddington, Tiina Eilittä, Tuire Oittinen,
Anna Vatanen, Laura Kohonen-Aho, Iira Rautiainen.
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Guest Blog: Promoting EM/CA in China

There is a growing interest in EM/CA in China, and I’m delighted that Enhua Guo, from the Ocean University of China, has written us a lively and informative account of new developments. In celebrating the 100th HDS (“Happy Data Session”) in China, he reflects on its evolution over the past three years, highlighting local practices, and sharing key takeaways with the international EMCA (Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis) community.

Enhua Guo

Data sessions are a crucial component of EMCA research and serve as one of the most fundamental means of conducting EMCA studies. On the foundational and pioneering work done by K.K. Luke (陆镜光), EMCA in China in the past two decades has seen remarkable development and growth, thanks to the unwavering efforts of some leading Chinese conversation analysts as Guodong Yu (于国栋), Yaxin Wu (吴亚欣), Wei Zhang (张惟), along with Ni-Eng Lim (林尔嵘) from Singapore.

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Guest Blog: The Conversation Analyst as an Expert Witness in the Courtroom

Some court cases rely on the interpretation of verbal exchanges – recorded conversations, interviews, police interrogations. The expert may be asked to say whether something is evidence of a bribe, a threat, a confession, and so on. Gary C. David PhD CCS is one of the very few conversation analysts who have been called on to help the court. His report makes for fascinating reading.

Gary C David, Bentley University

When is an interrogation and interview, or an interview an interrogation? How much does it matter how such encounters are characterized versus what they look like? How can we tell the difference between the two? These are questions that I had to address as I was asked to examine a police encounter with a person suspected of murder. My expert opinion could make a difference in whether evidence is admitted or excluded, and whether the suspect goes to trial or goes free.

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