THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND STRATEGIES OF ENQUIRY
3.2 STRATEGIES OF ENQUIRY
3.2.1 Ethnomethodology
Garfinkel’s pioneering work in 1967 was instrumental in advancing ethnomethodology as an approach to studying social reality. He explains that ethnomethodological studies
“seek to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study “(p. 1). This is a key aim of an EM study.
Ethnomethodology is interested in ordinary people’s methods of practical reasoning and is primarily descriptive; it sets out to show how human behaviour works, rather than to explain why some particular type of behaviour occurs (Holstein & Gubrium, 1994; Maynard & Clayman, 1991). As Kitzinger (2000) indicates, EM offers a model of people as agents and an interest in 1) how people construct social order rather than how they are animated by it, as well as 2) how everyday reality is produced by those engaging in it. An EM study focuses on how participants undertake conversation interaction – including how they make sense of each other or how they fail to do so;
how they negotiate these constructions of each other and how they characterise and connect the worlds they talk about (Baker, 2003). Drawing on aspects of this approach, I would like to explore how clients and counsellors construct the reality of VCT sessions – how they manage their interactions and pursue their objectives in the session.
From an epistemological perspective, ethnometholodologists see people as possessing practical, interactional and linguistic competencies (Holstein & Gubrium, 1998;
Maynard & Clayman, 1991), and examine what methods and practices participants use to make sense of settings, people and events that they encounter. As Baker (2003) states, an EM study is about how things are accomplished: “How do people accomplish their identities, their activities, their settings, their sense of social order” (p. 396). Words
are part of utterances that are treated as activities – analysis of conversational interaction involves tracing the work that is done turn-by-turn by each speaker (Baker, 2003).
Goffman (1983) defines social interaction as that which uniquely transpires in social situations, that is, environments in which two or more individuals are physically in one another’s presence. He elaborates that our daily life is spent in the immediate presence of others; and that whatever they are, “our doings are likely to be in the narrow sense, socially situated” (p. 2). He refers to this as the interaction order, and treats this “face- to-face domain as an analytically viable one and a domain whose preferred method of analysis is microanalysis” (p. 2). The social interaction of HIV/AIDS counselling operating at the microanalytical level was starting to develop as a useful way through which I could explore my interests in what clients and counsellors do in practice.
A distinguishing feature of EM is that it conceptualises social life as normative.
Goffman (1983) explains that the orderliness of social interaction “is predicated on a large basis of shared cognitive presuppositions, if not normative ones, and self- sustained restraints works” (p. 5) in that “each individual enters a social situation carrying an already established biography of prior dealings with the other participants – or at least with participants of their kind; and enters also with a vast array of cultural assumptions presumed to be shared (Goffman, 1983, p. 4). An EM study would focus on rules (norms, roles, etc.) of social interaction and these are treated as both topics and features of the settings they organise (Maynard & Clayman, 1991). In other words, ethnomethodology describes a set of norms and behaviours for any social context.
These are routine and what we all know. They create social order in this way in that we expect ourselves and others to behave in a particular way. Both participants in a VCT
encounter would “invoke their knowledge of the community of understandings”
(Garfinkel, 1967, p. 27) regarding counselling. As such, they would have some idea about how interactions of this kind typically work, and what would be expected of them. VCT has a set of norms that govern the interaction: norms about when to speak and when to listen, about who speaks first and who responds, norms regarding how participants ought to conduct themselves in that interaction, on how to do prevention and support talk, and so on.
Potter (1998), explains out that norms in interaction are typically oriented to (i.e.
supporting or favouring a particular point of view or set of beliefs) rather than governing action. He suggests that we could expect to find regular deviations from norms and that these orientations to or departures from the routine ways of doing things, and the impact this would have on the unfolding interaction, would be a useful aim of an EM analysis.
In summary, EM is informed by social constructionism and views language as the mechanism through and in which social reality is jointly constructed. EM also focuses on the language that people use to construct their social realities. It is descriptive and focuses on how social order is achieved. Social order is made possible through the normative rules, the routine ways of doing things that we are all aware of. EM is concerned with process, with how members use their common-sense resources, practices and methods to maintain the social order of things, or to get their objectives met in these circumstances.
3.2.2 Conversation analysis
Like ethnomethodology, conversation analysis focuses on the interactional and interpretive competencies of interactants, and how they collaborate to construct social realties (Miller & Fox, 2004). CA is informed by social constructionism in that by exploring talk-in-interaction in conversation we are studying social action and in particular how speakers both construct the ongoing event and their social selves (Schegloff, 1986). Talk-in-interaction is viewed as sequentially organised turns at talk through which speakers reflexively construct a context for their interaction, and work together to establish and maintain purposeful talk (Miller & Fox, 2004; Schegloff, 1992;
ten Have, 2004,). Both EM and CA focus on the local achievement of order by the use of socially organised procedures. While EM shows an interest in turns of talk, it does so in much broader and less technical terms than CA does (Baker, 2003). The extensive exploration of the sequential organisation of talk is seen by many as the emergence of conversation analysis as a related but separate discipline to EM (Korobov, 2001;
Maynard & Clayman, 1991; Miller & Fox, 2004; Schegloff, 1992; ten Have, 2002; ten Have, 2004).
CA focuses on meaning and context in interaction, and does so by linking these to sequences of talk (Heritage, 2004; Korobov, 2001). Heritage (2004, p. 222-3) explains that underlying CA is a fundamental theory about how participants orient to interaction, and how these create meaning. This theory involves three inter-related claims:
1. In constructing their talk, participants normally address themselves to the preceding talk, and particularly to the immediate preceding talk (in this sense talk is context-shaped).
2. In performing the current action, participants normally project and require that the next action should be performed by a subsequent participant (in doing so they maintain or renew a context for the next person’s talk).
3. By producing a next action, participants show an understanding of a prior action and do so at a number of levels (for example, by accounting for their risk behaviour, the client indicates that he/she has heard the counsellor’s question as a request to do so).
Of analytical interest in this study is how basic action sequences are organised, (for example how prevention and support talk are dealt with, and how conversations on these topics are opened and closed) as well as deviations from these turn-taking and interactional sequences (Heritage, 2004, p. 222). Like an EM study, conversation analysis views the procedures that inform these interactional sequences as normative in that participants can be held morally accountable both for departures from their use and for the inferences for their use that departures from their use may engender (ibid, p. 222).