04-Hesse-Biber2-4844.qxd 12/19/2005 5:55 PM Page 55 Sharlene Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavy (eds.) Emergent Methods in Social Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. In press. 4 Ethnography and Conversation Analysis What Is the Context of an Utterance? Douglas W. Maynard s this book makes clear, investigators who wish to examine social A phenomena in an immediate way—that is, without the technologies of the survey or other measuring instruments, coding, counting, and quantify- ing—have an increasing number of choices. The two choices I examine in this chapter are conversation analysis and ethnography. Conversation analysis (CA) investigates how utterances, by virtue of the sequences in which they appear, perform recognizable social actions. Traditional ethnography depends on interview and participant observation to capture facets of members’ life world, and would seem compatible with CA, which uses audio and video cap- ture of interaction in its natural settings. Doing CA involves scrutiny of recordings and detailed transcripts and would seem to be a more intense kind of observation, potentially adding to ethnographic strategies. Or, from the other direction, we could say that ethnography enhances the CA style of close Adapted from Maynard, D., Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings, copyright © 2003, reprinted with permission of The University of Chicago Press. 55 04-Hesse-Biber2-4844.qxd 12/19/2005 5:55 PM Page 56 56—— Emergent Methods in Social Research inspection of talk. We will see, however, that the combined use of ethnography and CA involves a number of theoretical and methodological issues and that these issues are important to consider when employing the two methodolo- gies together. In particular, if one is examining conversational interaction, a question is whether and how ethnography can provide access to the context in which talk and its constituent utterances reside. The substantive matter in this chapter is the conveyance of “bad news” between parties in various kinds of social settings. In previous research (Maynard, 1996, 2003) using ethnographic and other narrative data, I have shown that discrete strategies for presenting the news affect recipients’ real- ization of the news in different ways. As might be expected, both stalling and bluntness heighten the possibility of misapprehension, whereas the strategy of forecasting enhances understanding and apprehension of the news. Even a simple preannouncement, such as “I have some bad news,” helps to pre- pare a recipient for the forthcoming announcement. Essentially, forecasting works well because it has two facets to it. On the one hand, a deliverer who forecasts is giving some preindication to a recipient of what is to come. On the other hand, the recipient, having been signaled, can estimate and predict what the news will be, can anticipate what is going to be said. Indeed, a reg- ular pattern when news is forecasted is for recipients to venture a guess or candidate announcement and for the deliverer to simply confirm it. Here is one example: I have a friend who had a brother who was in a lot of trouble all the time over a period of a year. And I got a call from my friend and she said, “Have you talked to Mary?” and she sounded upset. And I said “no” and she sounded so upset, immediately in my brain it turned into uh oh what’s going on. And she said, “It’s Davy.” And immediately I said, “Is he dead?” And she said, “Yeah.” . But like I knew it before she said it. It was really strange because it was almost as if the conversation was just a play, because I knew what was going to happen and I just went through the ritual of the conversation. (Maynard, 2003, p. 45) In this case, the forecasting (“Have you talked to Mary?” “It’s Davy”) and the way it leads to the recipient’s guess (“Is he dead?”) seems rather inadver- tent, although at other times it is a more purposeful strategy. With a collection of narratives about bad news, identifying the strategies of delivery (whether they are done purposefully or not) and examining patterns of receipt will inevitably bring up a difficulty. It is that fitting the peculiarities of circumstance into one or the other of the analytically derived types of deliv- ery (forecasting, stalling, being blunt) is often not easy to do. For example, when a clinician stalls in telling parents diagnostic news, it can aggravate a 04-Hesse-Biber2-4844.qxd 12/19/2005 5:55 PM Page 57 Ethnography and Conversation Analysis—— 57 tendency on the part of parents to deny and normalize. Normalization, in turn, produces expectations on the part of potential recipients: The child was a twin, whose sister was stillborn. After the birth, the parents were told, “The other baby’s fine,” and the mother “didn’t realize that anything could still go wrong.” The baby was hard to feed, but the mother “thought it was just because she was a preemie.” When the baby was 6 months old, the mother began to realize that her daughter “was not holding things like other babies” but again attributed the slowness to her prematurity. When, at the baby’s regular 6-month checkup, the pediatrician suggested the possibility of cerebral palsy, the mother “just broke down completely in his office.” She said that she “just couldn’t believe it.” (Darling, 1979, p. 139) Even though we do not know the pediatrician’s exact manner of deliver- ing the bad news, the indications are that he was gently suggestive in a fore- casting manner rather than boldly forthright in presenting the diagnosis (he “suggested the possibility of cerebral palsy”). Nevertheless, in the context of an initial stall (“the other baby’s fine”) and the mother’s resultant normaliz- ing beliefs about her child, the disclosure appears to have been experienced as entirely blunt. In a way, the bluntness of an informing is not an innate prop- erty of the deliverer’s manner but is relative to the contingently ordered time delay in which the delivery ultimately occurs and to the set of convictions or beliefs a potential recipient holds during this period. Accordingly, whether any verbal form of delivery exhibits features of fore- casting, stalling, or bluntness is dependent on what participants know; what they expect; and how they hide, provide, and discern cues about their worlds of habitation. Consider how even the most terse verbal message can be part of a situational contexture that is utterly communicative to a recipient. A husband who was waiting for his wife to arrive home at a local airport after a brief trip knew that her return involved one change of planes in Denver. While awaiting her arrival, he heard the phone ring, and answered the phone, according to his own account, with a “casual hello.” The caller sighed heavily and said (without reciprocating my hello), “I’m in Denver.” I immediately identified the caller as my wife, and I knew from her sigh, the tone of her voice, her lack of reciprocity, and the violation of the mutually understood expectation that she wouldn’t call before I picked her up at the air- port that she had bad news. She informed me that her plane had been late and this led to her missing her connecting flight by three minutes. (Maynard, 2003, p. 59) Here, the utterance “I’m in Denver” merely reports the caller’s location. As a report, it does not name the type of news it projects. Nevertheless, the 04-Hesse-Biber2-4844.qxd 12/19/2005 5:55 PM Page 58 58—— Emergent Methods in Social Research narrator, operating in a context of mutual expectation regarding phone communication between his wife and himself, knows immediately “that she had bad news.” The upshot is that, instead of regarding these strategies as literal descrip- tions of complex modes of communication, behavior, and relationship, a better approach may be to regard them in the way that ethnomethodology regards talk. All utterances are indexical expressions: How a participant understands an utterance depends on the relation of that utterance to such things as the person speaking it and the time or place of its production (Garfinkel, 1967, pp. 4–5). In other words, for their meaning, utterances depend on their context; the character of a message is related to the particu- larity of circumstances in which it is embedded. The question is, of what does context consist? How is one to analyze context? One answer is, use ethnog- raphy because, by way of interview and observation, it gives wider access to the social setting than does the talk itself. For me, however, there is a differ- ent answer. An utterance’s context is the organized sequence of turns in which it appears. This is not to discount the role of ethnography but it is to say that the analyst draws on a much more immediate and local sense of an utterance’s context than ethnography provides. For example, to the extent possible, analytic interpretations of what someone says must be grounded internally to the conversation—in participants’ own, turn-by-turn, displayed understandings and practice-based orientations rather than less technical observations (note taking, for instance) or interview-based narratives about such interaction. Of course, this principled, or strong, version of CA methodology cannot work in relation to every feature of interaction. An investigator takes for granted or ignores some features in order to “focus” analytically on a partic- ular phenomenon or “activity type” (Drew & Heritage, 1992; Levinson, 1979). My own inquiry, dealing with the actions of delivering and receiving bad and good news as these actions traverse an array of social settings, is activity focused in this very sense.