Conversation Analysis of Video-Mediated Communication

Conversation Analysis of Video-

Mediated Communication:

Interactional Repair of Distortion in

Long-Distance Couples’ Video

Calls

© 2015 SAGE Publications, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Research Methods Datasets.

Conversation Analysis of Video-

Mediated Communication:

Interactional Repair of Distortion in

Long-Distance Couples’ Video

Calls

Student Guide

The Conceptual Underpinnings of Naturalistic Interactional Data

Ethnomethodology (EM) names both an object of study and research

recommendation for this study (Garfinkel, 1967). Although the term has

‘methodology’ in its name, it does not name an academic research method

per se. The object of study is people’s (‘ethno’) practices for achieving social

life as recognizably orderly (‘methodology’). The ‘research recommendation’ is

to accept the inductive onus to unpack the social reasoning and resources of

members rather than assuming an academically privileged deductive position in

which theories predict or explain practices. As such, data is typically recorded

and collected in naturally occurring situations rather than controlled situations

(like labs) and the measuring of situations mechanistically (through surveys, etc.).

The related fields of Conversation Analysis (CA) (Sacks, 1992) and Membership

Categorisation Analysis (MCA) (Fitzgerald & Housley, 2015) concentrate

particularly on collecting recordings of communication situations (and transcripts

thereof). Conversation Analysis is evolving a specialized ‘grammar of action’

to unpack social orderliness as it is manifested through sequential turns in

interaction. Lerner (2003) describes Conversation Analysis as looking for "context-

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Page 2 of 21 Conversation Analysis of Video-Mediated Communication: Interactional

Repair of Distortion in Long-Distance Couples’ Video Calls

free but context-sensitive" practices – recognizable structures in talk that can

occur in almost any kind of interaction but are adapted specifically to their moment

of use. Membership Categorisation Analysis explores the specific ways in which

members’ understandings of the world are systematically deployed via vernacular

categories in sequences of interaction.

Representativeness or generalizability, then, are less important to these methods

than recognisability. Research typically uses small numbers of participants and

cases (although there are some exceptions). The number of participants and

cases will depend on what is needed to explore actual action rather than abstract

away from it. Sometimes concentrating on just one case allows for a deep

exploration of particular reasoning and resources brought to bear on a short

sequence. At other times it allows exploration of the evolution of reasoning and

resources over a long section within one conversation (e.g. changing character

referents over the course of recounting an event, as in Fitzgerald & Rintel 2013).

Most often there is a need to build at least a small collection to show some

variation in practices, although this collection may be ad hoc in nature and focused

more on the richness of perspicuous examples than on reaching a saturation point

of variations in cohort or behaviour.

Data Exemplar: Recording and Transcribing Couples’ Video Calls

For this project Sean recruited couples in distance relationships of one year’s

duration or greater, so that ‘getting to know you’ issues were not conflated with

the issues of coming to terms with the video calling experience. Since Sean knew

that he wanted naturalistic data, this meant recruiting couples who would not

mind him seeing into their homes whenever they were talking, which is obviously

quite invasive even with permission. As such, Sean had to rely on convenience

sampling to recruit couples open enough to being recorded. He used flyers and

email to find relationally and technologically eligible couples. Many more than six

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couples actually signed up for the project but in the end due to various relational

problems and technological breakdowns experienced by many couples, only six

couples produced enough usable data to be included in the study.

The couples were asked to talk for at least 20 minutes, once a week, for two

months, on their own timetable. No tasks were required and there were no

other controls apart from minimum technology standards. With their consent, an

automatic remote recording system captured all video calls without any effort on

their part. Creating this system was decidedly non-trivial. See Rintel (2007) for the

many technical challenges and choices made to find a viable method of recording

the couples naturalistically, including choice of video calling application, methods

of recording, and issues in in-home and recording-room setup.

Transcripts of audio/video data are used to create a persistent record of

interactional sequences. Transcription is generally based on Gail Jefferson’s

(2004) standardised system, with some contextual decisions about the level and

type of detail required to ensure that the data is adequately inspectable by

readers. In this collection, four key decisions were made about transcription:

1. For video data in general there is always the question of how much of

the visual to transcribe along with the audio. Transcribing every

gesture, every facial expression, etc. would be impossible, so the

answer lies in balancing the amount of detail with the need to let the

data tell stories that may not be anticipated as well as the focus on the

current project.

2. This project adapted the transcription practice of visually indicating the

duration of non-talk events. For this project the primary non-talk events

that needed to be reflected in the transcript were the duration of audio/

video distortions. Numerical time measurement was shown along with

underscores to indicate elapsed time. Three underscores "___" were

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used to represent every 0.5 seconds of distortion.

3. Rather than separating verbal and visual action or using tables with

each actor in their own column, everything was placed in the one line.

Physical activity was bounded by "@ @" symbols and distorted activity

was bounded by "{}" symbols with a description of the distortion when

useful, e.g. "FREEZES". This format made it easier to see when one

participant’s action of any kind overlapped with that of the other

participant.

4. Certain communicative actions such as laughter, vocal intonations,

and other sounds were not phonetically transcribed because this

analysis did not require precision for those actions.

Key to Transcription symbols

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The data in this exemplar is taken from Rintel (2013) "Video Calling in Long-

Distance Relationships: The Opportunistic use of Audio/Video Distortions as a

Relational Resource", which can be found in the further reading list. The couples

recorded for this project gave their consent for clips of video being displayed

for the purposes of teaching and research. The couple’s names have been

changed in the transcripts and clips have been edited to remove other identifying

information.

Analysis: Finding and Exploring Distortion as an Interactional and

Relational Resource in Video Calls

Sacks (1992) enjoins us to always ask "why that there?" of any given

communicative action. In this case, Sean’s overarching version of "why that

there?" was "why mention technology there?" By considering when and how

users treated the fact that they were talking via video calling as relevant, Sean

was able to flesh out arguments that treated audio/video distortion not simply as

troublesome ‘noise’ in the conduit of interaction, but as a resource to enact their

relationships. Sean walks us through how we might analyse such interactions.

The impetus for this project came from my own experience with maintaining

long-distance relationships using video calling, and it fitted with research needs:

endogenous for participants, variable in form, findable, and manageable in terms

of the number of cases.

Distortion was a naturally-occurring problem for all couples, although variably

common and severe. Although distortion itself was a technical problem, prior

research into practices of conversational repair (Hayashi, Raymond, & Sidnell,

2013) meant that there were recognizable language and other ‘anchors’ that

could be searched for in the users’ interaction (e.g. "what?" or "you’re frozen").

Similarly, although there were many cases of distortion, I could reasonably discard

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any instances in which participants did not directly engage with distortion as an

interactional issue, as those instances were treated as ‘let pass’ by participants.

Having found an anchor for a distortion problem, the boundaries of each distortion

episode could be easily drawn – the beginning was the most contextually relevant

turn prior to a repair initiation and the end was when any talk about the distortion

was complete and orderly sequential turn-taking was again occurring. While there

was an interesting range of variations, the total set of cases to be analysed was

bounded because only a small proportion of total talk was about distortion. The

collection thus ended up as a very manageable 145 cases.

I was able to organize the range of responses to the problem in terms of the form

and severity of distortion as well as the social or technological reactions, which

allowed for interesting comparison and contrast of cases. While each case was

analysed on its merit, it was important to consider the relationship of cases to one

another. Specifically, it was only because I started with the shortest cases with

the least distortion and simplest social repair that I was able to sensibly analyse

the more complex cases and, in turn, construct the broader argument that audio/

video distortion is not always treated by users as simply a threshold matter or an

undifferentiated negative.

Ethnomethodology explores actions in interactional sequences rather than

themes or topics. In the collection as a whole there were many ‘content-oriented

remedies of distortion’, where a word or two was missing or garbled and users

dealt with this by orienting to repairing the missing or garbled content. These were

identifiable because they looked a lot like co-present and telephone interactional

repair sequences. Specifically at the heart of these problems would be the

following kinds of actions (sometimes in just this form or sometimes spread over

several turns):

• A repair initiation: one person alerting the other that a prior turn was not

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heard or understood.

• A repair initiation ratification: the recipient of the repair initiation indicating

that the repair initiation was understood.

• A repair attempt: the recipient of the repair initiation doing something that

referenced the possibly not heard or understood prior material.

• A ratification of repair by continuation and/or direct repair

acknowledgement: the recipient of the repair continues the thread of the

conversation with the new material, possibly preceded by or including a

direct acknowledgement of the success or the repair.

There were, of course, many kinds of language anchors for these actions.

Obviously any direct reference to not hearing or understanding would be clear,

as would any direct description of distortion (e.g. "it cut out"), but also what Drew

(1997) calls "open" class repair initiators (e.g. "what?"), which might occur without

any accompanying direct description of the problem. Example 1 shows the use

of an open class repair initiator (line 2) and an unmarked repair (line 3) followed

by ratification of repair by continuation of talk without further reference to the

reason for the problem. The repair initiator is treated as unambiguous and the

repair is accepted without explanation. Neither the nature of the content nor the

technological cause is treated as relevant to accomplishing the repair.

Example 1 (Example 1 in Rintel (2013))

Video: Example 1

Transcript

00:01

-[INAUDIBLE]? [? -No. ?] -Oh. -They're like, old. [? Like, you know ?] what she-- you want to know what she did? -What? -She broke out the cake. -The

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what?

00:21

-She broke out the cheesecake. -Oh, that's nice. -It was [INAUDIBLE].

In co-present interaction, repair can be self-initiated or other-initiated. Apart from

the technical distortion, Example 1 is structurally identical to other-initiated repair

in co-present interaction. It is important to note that self-initiated repair directly

after distortion is far less likely in current video calling systems because of

the asymmetry of audio and video production and reception. In video calling,

speakers hear themselves producing their sound ambiently, then it is transmitted

to recipients who hear a digitised version of the sound. To a speaker a turn at

talk might have been produced totally fluently, but due to network latency and

jitter, the digitised version heard by the recipient may come out missing words or

garbled without the speaker knowing. Hearers alert speakers to the need for repair

in these cases, either directly through a repair initiation of some sort, or through

an apparent misunderstanding that a speaker then follows up.

That asymmetry issue may not always be relevant to the interactants and may not

come out in a particular example (as indeed it was not in Example 1). However, to

build an argument about interaction via technology it is important for the analyst to

know these technical features, bear them in mind during the analysis of any given

case, and then search for cases that are different. Example 2 shows a case that

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is only just a little different to Example 1, but the difference is crucial.

In Example 2, again the issue is that a turn is distorted, and the form of repair

initiation is quite similar to Example 1, but the difference lies in turn 3, where

instead of simply repairing by repeating talk, the user also proposes that

technology might be playing a role in the reason for repair.


Video: Example 2

Transcript

00:00

SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE].

00:02

SPEAKER 2: I'll bring an air mattress that'll sleep two.

00:06

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, that sounds cool.

00:10

SPEAKER 2: could probably sleep on the couch [AUDIO OUT] three.

00:14

SPEAKER 1: Wait. What?

00:16

SPEAKER 2: Someone could probably sleep on-- did it cut out?

00:19

SPEAKER 1: Yes.

00:20

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SPEAKER 2: Someone could probably sleep on the couch. And--

Transcript:

The full analysis of Example 2 can be found in (Rintel, 2013), but for the purposes

of this methodological discussion the difference between Example 1 and Example

2 is found by asking ‘why that there?’ of turn 3. Why does Des start his turn with

a repetition of his prior turn – a standard way to respond to an other-initiated

repair – and then cut himself off before finishing that repetition to ask a candidate

answer question ("did it cut out?") about the reason for Kay’s repair initiation?

It is in noticing this difference that we can begin to build a case about what

distortions mean to couples in the course of an interaction. My argument stemmed

from Drew’s (1997) finding that open class repair initiators sometimes reference

not hearing the content, but in other cases are referencing a moral problem

with the content. I repeatedly found that when my couples were discussing their

relationship, responses to repairs often included questions aimed at

disambiguating whether the repair was initiated because of technological

distortion or for some other reason. My inference was that "distortions during

relational topics may require disambiguation as to whether the repair initiator

referred to distorted content, which just needs to be supplied for the conversation

to continue, or an issue with the nature of the content, requiring relational

discussion." This precise deployment of disambiguation is an example of an

‘ethnomethod’ – a methodical practice that is used by people to sort out some

issue of social order. The ethnomethod is not mine as a researcher, I did not

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simply interpret the behaviour to fit my interests, or create the method through

specialized pattern recognition (such as statistical regression), or derive it from an

existing theory (except insofar as I built my finding upon Drew’s (1997) findings).

The ethnomethod of ‘disambiguation of technological or other reason for repair’ is

context-free – one can find it across all sorts of interactions via technology – and

context-sensitive – in this case it was uniquely fitted to this repair, and somewhat

more broadly fitted to the relational context of all the calls in this collection.

Let me turn to a video distortion. The issue of self- or other-initiation of repair

discussed above seemed to be especially key to coping with visual distortions,

because again speakers produce gestures or facial expressions totally fluently

and recipients receive digitized versions that may be corrupted, with missing part

or whole actions, or blurred or frozen video. It is thus either up to recipients of such

video distortion to raise it as an issue or for a perceptive speaker to realize that a

gesture may have been missed by virtue of a response that does not ratify uptake

of the gesture’s meaning. This is what happens in Example 3. Kay winks to defuse

a relational tease, but Des appears to miss it due to distortion. When Kay realises

this, she has to check on its reception and then work to restore relational order.


Video: Example 3

Transcript

00:04

SPEAKER 1: You have no teeth. [LAUGHING] Your mouth is so blurry. It looks like it's sewed shut.

00:15

SPEAKER 2: All right. I'll turn up my quality. It's still choppy. I wish it was better.

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00:22

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, me too, but it's not. This is why you can't date people far away.

00:28

SPEAKER 2: Ah. Very funny.

00:33

SPEAKER 1: Did you like that?

00:34

SPEAKER 2: What'd you do? Did you wink?

00:39

SPEAKER 1: Mhm. [LAUGHING]

00:42

SPEAKER 2: Here. Oh, boy.

00:44

SPEAKER 1: Can you see that?

00:46

SPEAKER 2: Yes, I saw that. How do I look now?

00:50

SPEAKER 1: You look better.

00:52

SPEAKER 2: Am I choppier?

00:54

SPEAKER 1: No.

00:55

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SPEAKER 2: You should turn your frame right down to 7. Actually, I just did.

01:00

SPEAKER 1: To 7?

01:02

SPEAKER 2: It's one down from 15.

01:06

SPEAKER 1: Oh, that. Is that good?

01:17

SPEAKER 2: Now, you just completely stopped. No, that looks good, I think.

01:22

SPEAKER 1: How about now?

01:25

SPEAKER 2: It's OK. It looked good for a few seconds, and then it totally stopped, and then it's OK again. Who knows?

01:32

SPEAKER 1: How am I now? Is it good?

01:35

SPEAKER 2: Sure. What do you have it set to?

01:40

SPEAKER 1: 7 and 50.

01:45

SPEAKER 2: Cool.

01:47

SPEAKER 1: Can you see me?

01:48

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SPEAKER 2: Mhm.

01:49

SPEAKER 1: Do I look choppy? [LAUGHING]

01:53

SPEAKER 2: I didn't see your mouth move at all when you just said that.

01:56

SPEAKER 1: Do I look choppy?

01:58

SPEAKER 2: No, you look perfect.

01:60

SPEAKER 1: Do I look choppy?

02:03

SPEAKER 2: You sound choppy.

02:04

SPEAKER 1: Do I look choppy? [BABBLING] Oh no.

02:09

SPEAKER 2: OK, good night. Good night, good night.

Transcript:

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The methodological point is found in the "why that there?" of line 15. Why did Kay

ask "Did you like that" after her winks and Des’s ironic evaluation of her tease (line

8)? In the analysis I describe this as follows:

"Kay’s request for candidate positive assessment treats Des as not having

provided an adequate or expected response to the winks, and is thus a repair

initiator (I→; "Did you like that?", line 15). By asking if Des liked the winks, she

is less interested in an actual assessment of the winks’ "likeability" than Des

understanding the winks as indications that the prior turn was a tease that is now

being softened. Of course, Kay does not know that the winks were troubled, only

that she did not immediately receive the expected response and that she is trying

to defuse a relational tease. Thus she has a strong warrant to ensure that Des

sees the winks."

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Having described this work by Kay, I again need to consider it in the light of both

the other distortions in the example and by comparison to prior repairs such as in

Example 1 and Example 2. As with Example 2 above, my argument invokes the

relational context of the pair as a couple as providing a reason for Kay’s pursuit of

Des understanding that she winked to defuse the tease:

"The pursuit of this visual content as relevant specifically to its relational context

takes place within a larger instance of the couple explicitly orienting to the two

other forms of distortion: blurry video (Kay) and choppy sound (Des). Technology-

oriented remedy (moving the application’s image/sound quality controls) was

very much explicitly on the table right before and after this instance. But in the

moment, the relational tease which specifically invokes the problems of using

video calling to maintain the long-distance relationship is treated as the most

relevant repairable."

However, it is important to note that being a couple does not consist of stable

categories or solely internal attitudes towards others (Pomerantz & Mandelbaum,

2004). Relationships are an interactional achievement – they have to be

methodically produced as recognizable. In this case of video calling, then, being

a couple is not the simplistic contextual bucket that explains the users’ behaviour,

rather it is by the users’ expressive behaviour that they choose to enact for one

another their status as a couple. In the case of Example 3’s missing wink, of all

the things that the users could have chosen to repair, it was the most relationally-

oriented facial expression to which the users paid attention.

Ultimately we see in this example a version of what Hutchby (2001) calls

"technologised interaction". The material constraints of the technology – in this

case various distortions –inescapably frame the interaction, but that does not

mean they determine people’s behaviours. Rather, the interactants orient to

expressive possibilities (Harper, 2010) of relational and technological

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omnirelevance (Rintel, 2015).

Reflective Questions

1. This form of analysis relies on precise transcripts from which

arguments are made based on sequential turns at talk. Could the same

arguments be made or found through interviews with couples?

2. Sean’s research interest was in coping with distortion, but what other

ethnomethods could be found in these data? What could you say

about couples’ video calls through looking at what is in the field of view

of the video? Could other arguments be made about video calls that

are not about couples? Could other arguments be made about the

difference between co-present talk and video calls?

3. These couples were aware that they were being recorded, albeit not

constantly reminded. Does this seem to be reflected in the data?

Further Reading

Drew, P. (1997). "Open" class repair initiators in response to sequential sources

of troubles in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 28, 69–102. doi: 10.1016/

S0378-2166(97)89759-7.

Fitzgerald, R., & Rintel, S. (2013). From lifeguard to bitch: The problem of

promiscuous categories in story telling via video chat by a long-distance couple.

Australian Journal of Communication, 40(2). Retrieved from

http://austjourcomm.org/index.php/ajc/article/view/7/125.

Fitzgerald, R., & Housley, W. (2015) (Eds.). Membership categorization analysis:

Studies of social knowledge in action. London: SAGE.

Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

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http://austjourcomm.org/index.php/ajc/article/view/7/125

Prentice-Hall.

Harper, R.H.R. (2010). Texture: Human expression in the age of communications

overload. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hayashi, M., Raymond, G., and Sidnell, J. eds. (2013). Conversational repair

and human understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hutchby, I. (2001). Conversation and technology: From the telephone to the

internet. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G.

Lerner (Ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13–34).

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lerner, G.H. (2003). Selecting next speaker: The context-sensitive operation of a

context-free organization. Language in Society, 32(2), 177–201.

Pomerantz, A., & Mandelbaum, J. (2004). A conversation analytic approach

to relationships: Their relevance for interactional conduct. In K. Fitch and R.E.

Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of language and social interaction (pp. 149–171).

Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Rintel, S. (2015). Omnirelevance in technologized interaction: Couples coping

with video calling distortions. In R. Fitzgerald and W. Housley (Eds.),

Membership categorization analysis: Studies of social knowledge in action (pp.

123–150). London, UK: Sage.

Rintel, S. (2013). Tech-tied or tongue-tied? Technological versus social trouble

in relational video calling. In Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Hawaii International

Conference on System Sciences (pp. 3343–3352). doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2013.512.

Rintel, S. (2007). Maximizing environmental validity: Remote recording of desktop

videoconferencing. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on

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Human-Computer Interaction: Interaction Design and Usability (pp. 911–920). doi:

10.1007/978-3-540-73105-4_100.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation. 2 vols. Edited by G. Jefferson with

introductions by E.A. Schegloff. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Conversation Analysis of Video-Mediated Communication