SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODS
The research is informed by the sociological principles and methods of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis.
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What is our 'data'?
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For the purposes
of this research into professional sport and mental health access to data is determined and restricted by access to teams, players, coaches and so on.
As a result, 'data' in this project includes:
Press conferences - with managers, players etc
Media interviews - One-to-one setting with managers, players etc
Newspaper or sporting website articles
Official press statements - by clubs or sporting organisations
Social media posts - team, player (but not fans or supporters)
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Ethnomethodology:
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The study of social and cultural practices. Focusing on how we share and communicate these things with one another, in our conduct and words. How we repeat and reproduce these traces of our society and make them hear-able, see-able, intelligible for other people we interact with. These include:
Playing chess (properly or not, accounting for actions)
Queuing (i.e. who's first, how to join/leave)
Gender as performative and enacted (e.g. what we where, make-up, how we talk, walk, what we're interested in)
Specific work-sites, professions and social settings
Newspaper headlines (how they lead readers to a particular orientation or idea about what follows)
Key sources:
GARFINKEL, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology, Cambridge, Polity.
HERITAGE, J. 1984. Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Cambridge, Polity Press.
HEATH, C., HINDMARSH, J. & LUFF, P. 2010. Video in qualitative research, London, Sage.
LYNCH, M. 2007. The Origins of Ethnomethodology. In: TURNER, S. & RISJORD, M. (eds.) Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
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Conversation Analysis:
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The study of communication and interaction. The method focuses upon how conversation is jointly produced and coordinated for particular purposes. These include:
Mundane conversations on the bus
Doctor-patient medical consultations
Teacher-student classroom activities
Calls to emergency helplines
The point of such an approach is to describe conversation as a social action, in which the organisation and structures of talk are available to the speakers and others (e.g. analysts).
My favourite texts on conversation analysis remain those written by original masterminds, Harvey Sacks and Emmanuel Schegloff:
SACKS, H. 1995. Lectures on Conversation Oxford, Blackwell.
SCHEGLOFF, E. A. 2007. Sequence Organisation in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis I, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Approaches to transcription:
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Conversation analysts (and some ethnomethodologists) use a set of transcription conventions developed by Gail Jefferson to capture a range of features of talk:
Temporal and sequential aspects (timings, pauses, overlaps, turn-taking)
Speech delivery (e.g. loud/quiet, fast/slow, cut-offs, sound stretches, emphasis, inhale/exhale, laughter)
Full conventions with examples and can be found in this publication and these links:
JEFFERSON, G. 2004. Glossary of transcript Symbols with an Introduction. In: LERNER, G. (ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
http://liso-archives.liso.ucsb.edu/Jefferson/Transcript.pdf
For all of Jefferson's published work go here:
http://liso-archives.liso.ucsb.edu/Jefferson/
Excellent introductory video from Emily Hofstedder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1LpiIDKp2I
Useful tools:
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/schegloff/TranscriptionProject/index.html (Transcript conventions with sound clips)
http://ca-tutorials.lboro.ac.uk/notation.htm
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