summary

In preparing these materials I wanted to give a brief introduction to one way of analysing social activities, for people who are unfamiliar with the approach. People sometimes get put off by the formal and technical vocabulary used in this kind of work. They feel they need to know every term. But at the heart of the work are a set of problems that are relatively easy to understand and get into. 

If you want to take things further, probably the best place to start is with 'lectures on conversation'. These are edited transcripts of Harvey Sacks' lectures at UCLA (fall 1964 - spring 1972). 

Have a look at other on-line tutorials, by Charles Antaki and Emmanuel Schegloff. They are super-stars and go well beyond what I have done here. The EMCA Wiki is amazing and has loads of resources relating to conferences, publications, people and transcription.

I find Hutchby and Wooffitt's book (Conversation Analysis, Polity) to be the best introductory text. The Introduction to CA by Jack Sidnell is great too (Conversation Analysis: An Introduction, Wiley-Blackwell). The book on Video Analysis by Christian Heath, Jon Hindmarsh and Paul Luff (Video in Qualitative Research, Sage) is excellent. These authors are all technically brilliant, and manage to write in a compelling and engaging way for the non-expert.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please e-mail me at Nick.Llewellyn@wbs.ac.uk