THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND STRATEGIES OF ENQUIRY
3.3 UNDERSTANDING CONTEXT
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).
Instead, CA starts with the view that context is both a project and the product of the participant’s actions (Korobov, 2001). Context is achieved through language – it is through interaction that context is built up, invoked and managed (ibid). This is a much more dynamic view of context as something which is both locally produced and transformed at any moment. As Peräkylä (1995) observes, context is an “awareness of what is said, when it is said, how and by whom and to whom” (p. 32). Talk in VCT is unique in both the things that are talked about but also in its action orientation – i.e.
what participants do with their talk. For example, how do participants create contexts that can be heard as “doing information talk or advice talk or support talk”? In this study, I am interested in a more local and dynamic view of context in that I want to investigate how through an analysis of client-counsellor talk, particular HIV/AIDS contexts are built up, managed and invoked.
Holstein and Gubrium (2004) argue that the CA focus on the sequential development of conversation can limit the researcher to focusing on the procedural hows of the interaction. Wetherell (1998) believes that the focus on the orientation of the participants (how they hear the previous turn, and respond to it in their next turn) is too narrow. These researchers argue that in looking at talk-in-interaction we need to look at the larger whats that compel us to talk in particular ways (i.e. meaning-making discourses and how they operate in practice) (Holstein & Gubrium, 2004; Wetherell, 1998).
On the other hand, CA researchers argue that context is constituted on every occasion in social interaction, and are resistant to appeals to external contextual explanations for what is happening in the interaction. Doing so too soon in the analysis deflects the researcher from describing how the parties concerned attend to the local production of
shared understandings (Silverman, 1997; Silverman & Gubrium, 1994). These writers argue that there is nothing wrong with a search for explanations provided that the search for explanations is grounded in a close understanding of how the phenomena being explained are put together at an interactional level. Once you have understood the how, you then move to explanations about why this phenomenon happens in the way that it does.
And finally, I am interested in the settings where VCT takes place – in both medical and non-medical contexts. I think about settings in a similar way to how I think about how context is created in and through the talk – i.e. settings are not an external category imposed on the talk. Instead, like the dynamic view of context, social settings can be thought of as providing members with discursive resources and opportunities for constructing a variety of social realities. In addition, as Miller and Fox (2004) point out, institutional settings or contexts are unlikely to provide all members with equal opportunities and resources for pursuing their interests in the interaction, thus producing social conditions in which some definitions of reality are more likely to prevail than others. Particularly important to my study of social organisation of a counselling encounter was to explore how participants assemble their conversations in order to produce social contexts within which some interactional patterns and social relationships are encouraged over others (Gubrium & Holstein, 1997).
This is a study of the institutional context of a voluntary counselling and testing interaction. Institutional interactions are those that normally involve the participants in specific goal orientations which are tied to their institution-relevant identities – in this case that of HIV/AIDS counsellor or client (Heritage, 2004). In institutional interactions, parties co-construct and identify various goals or tasks relevant to the
completion of their business together (Heritage, 2004). Sketchley (1989, in Burnard, 1992) identified HIV/AIDS counselling as comprising of three core interactional tasks or activities: 1) giving information, 2) giving advice and 3) providing support.
Within this study, I intend to investigate how participants jointly construct and maintain the social order of a counselling interaction. Using tools from both EM and CA, I want to analyse how participants construct the various goals or tasks relevant to an HIV/AIDS counselling interaction together. This CA/EM-inspired study will allow me to adopt an ethnomethodological distance (Peräkylä &Vehviläinen, 2003) in describing counselling practice in that the goal is to analyse practitioners’ unfolding actions in real situations – not to actively discuss competent practitioners, or good or bad practice. To this end, I focus on various strategies participants use to work through the information, advice and support tasks of the encounter; how they progressively develop a sense of the task that is to be accomplished; and how they explore the role that each plays in the process.