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RuiterAlbert2017 - An Appeal for a Methodological Fusion of Conversation Analysis and Experimental Psychology.pdf (1.66 MB)

An appeal for a methodological fusion of conversation analysis and experimental psychology

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posted on 2019-04-09, 13:00 authored by J.P. de Ruiter, Saul AlbertSaul Albert
©, Published with license by Taylor & Francis. © 2017 J. P. de Ruiter and Saul Albert. Human social interaction is studied by researchers in conversation analysis (CA) and psychology, but the dominant methodologies within these two disciplines are very different. Analyzing methodological differences in relation to major developments in the philosophy of science, we suggest that a central difference is that psychologists tend to follow Popper’s falsificationism in dissociating the context of discovery and the context of justification. In CA, following Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, these two contexts are much closer to one another, if not inextricable. While this dissociation allows the psychologist a much larger theoretical freedom, because psychologists “only” need to validate their theories by generating confirmed predictions from experiments, it also carries the risk of generating theories that are less robust and pertinent to everyday interaction than the body of knowledge accumulated by CA. However, as long as key philosophical differences are well understood, it is not an inherently bad idea to generate predictions from theories and use quantitative and experimental methods to test them. It is both desirable and achievable to find a synthesis between methodologies that combines their strengths and avoids their weaknesses. We discuss a number of challenges that would need to be met and some opportunities that may arise from creating such a synthesis.

Funding

Saul Albert’s work was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through the Media and Arts Technology Programme, a Research Councils UK Centre for Doctoral Training (EP/G03723X/1).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Research on Language and Social Interaction

Volume

50

Issue

1

Pages

90 - 107

Citation

DE RUITER, J.P. and ALBERT, S., 2017. An appeal for a methodological fusion of conversation analysis and experimental psychology. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 50(1), pp. 90 - 107.

Publisher

© the Authors. Published by Taylor and Francis

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Publication date

2017-01-04

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor and Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0835-1813

Language

  • en