doing analysis

getting started

Once you've transcribed a stretch of action, what next? In practice, people work in different ways, depending on lots of things, their questions, the nature of the data they have, their preferred style. Some people work with huge comparative samples (see Stivers et al 2009), there is a tradition of analysing single cases (see Whalen et al. 1986, Schegloff 1987) and a range of things in between. Here I'm just going to note how you can start to gain some traction on your materials, returning to the Big Issue data. In so doing, we can start to sense theoretical implications of this work.

'noticing'

Analysis is often discussed in terms of ‘noticing’. The analyst looks at some data and starts looking for things that actors are noticing. Sounds a little mysterious doesn't it, so it might be useful to look at some clips.

In one encounter I looked at, someone approaches a Big Issue seller and presents him with some money, not in exchange for a magazine, but as a ‘donation’. Now that is immediately something to get stuck into, and you can start to gain some traction on that very quickly. Think back to the 'how are you example'. We have something similar here. The question in this data is how do people recognise and distinguish 'giving' and 'buying' (rather than 'greetings' and 'inquiries'). This is something you could produce an analysis around and it has broader theoretical relevance, providing a distinctive ethnomethodological treatment of the distinction between 'commodities' and 'gifts' which runs through sociology and anthropology. 

In a second case I  was struck by the fact that the 'donor' didn't say anything (see the images below). She handed money over like a relay runner passes the baton. She had done some preparatory work, getting money to hand. In fact, she does not stop walking at any point, she merely slows down.