The Role of Numbers and Statistics within Conversation Analysis

In this article, I discuss the role of numbers and statistics within Conversation Analysis (hereafter CA). Due to space limitations, I do not review CA (see Heritage, 1984). Furthermore, I do not focus on CA’s concerns regarding the use of quantification (e.g., ratios) to derive or operationalize statistically manipulable variables (see Schegloff, 1993). Finally, I do not focus on CA’s concerns regarding the validity of statistically associating variables, especially when they are not demonstrably relevant to, or procedurally consequential for, participants (see Schegloff, 1992). The latter enterprise is sometimes called applied CA when one of the variables is a product of CA. However, applied CA is a misnomer because it implies that such work represents a type of CA, which it does not. Rather, it represents an application of CA (which takes nothing away from its value; see Heritage, 2004). Instead, I address numbers and statistics in terms of proving certain types of CA claims, with the hope of clarifying ambiguity and increasing analytic rigor. I begin by reviewing CA’s conception of order and then outline two different, yet interrelated, CA projects: analyzing single cases and documenting practices of action. The latter project involves claims about communication rules that generate regular patterns of understanding and interactional organization. As such, achieving this goal involves evidentiary requirements that implicate numbers and statistics. Conversation analysts should (perhaps reluctantly) find these requirements to be methodologically acceptable, although they are neither easily nor typically satisfied, at least in single articles/chapters. COMMUNICATION METHODS AND MEASURES, 1(1), 65–75 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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