# Lesson 10 — Discourse Analysis (v3 expanded)

*Companion-podcast transcript • Sarah & Kiffer*  
*~5156 words • ~28.6 min audio*

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**Sarah:** Welcome back to Office Hours. I'm Sarah.

**Kiffer:** And I'm Kiffer. Today is Lesson ten, Discourse Analysis. And this is the lesson where the analytic gaze on a transcript shifts in a way that takes a beat to get used to.

**Sarah:** Right. Through the first nine lessons, we treated transcripts mainly as containers of content. We coded for themes. We compared cases. We built typologies. We counted occurrences. The unit of interest was what a participant said. The propositional substance of the talk.

**Kiffer:** Exactly. In this lesson, the unit of interest becomes what the talk does. How a question opens a space the answer is obliged to fill. How a pause does the work of refusing without saying no. How a preface like, okay this is going to sound dramatic, but, rearranges a listener's expectations before the speaker has actually said anything dramatic at all.

**Sarah:** And the theoretical shift behind that is large. Language as performative, in J L Austin's sense. Saying something is doing something.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. Austin's nineteen sixty-two book How to Do Things with Words, and Searle's later elaboration of speech-act theory in nineteen sixty-nine, refused the framing of utterances as primarily true-or-false propositions. Many utterances, warnings, promises, apologies, declarations, invitations, are not the kinds of things that can be true or false. I promise to be there is not a description of a promise. It is the promise. Austin called these performative utterances and argued that virtually all everyday talk has a performative dimension even when it appears descriptive.

**Sarah:** And the textbook treats this as the third major moment in the analysis of texts, after content analysis and the structural narrative methods we covered last week. There are three principal strands. Conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and discursive psychology.

**Kiffer:** Right. We'll go through the three strands first, then spend most of our time on conversation analysis because that's the textbook's central exemplar and the strand whose moves transfer most directly to interview data. Then we'll bring in Jefferson transcription, Goffman's dramaturgical framework, and a working orientation to critical discourse analysis. And we'll land on the week ten milestone.

**Sarah:** Okay. Let's start with what discourse analysis is, generally. The working definition.

**Kiffer:** The simplest definition is the systematic study of language-in-use. Language not as an abstract system of signs but as it's deployed by actual speakers in actual contexts to accomplish actual social action. The qualifier in use is doing real work. Discourse analysts are not asking whether a sentence is grammatical in English. They're asking what speakers did with that sentence in the particular conversation.

**Sarah:** And it's worth pausing on the comparison to what we've already learned. Content analysis treats the transcript as a window onto its referents. What the participant said about loneliness, about their week, about their family. Narrative analysis treats the transcript as a story with structural features. Discourse analysis treats the transcript as a record of conversational action. What the interviewer and participant did to each other turn by turn to produce the talk that appears on the page.

**Kiffer:** Right. All three can be applied to the same transcript and will produce different, complementary findings. Discourse analysis is not a replacement. It's a layer.

**Sarah:** Okay. The three strands. Walk us through conversation analysis first.

**Kiffer:** C A was developed in the nineteen sixties and seventies by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. Three students of the sociologist Erving Goffman who took Goffman's interest in the orderliness of social interaction and pushed it into the empirical study of recorded talk. Their intellectual debt was double. Goffman gave them the topic. Interaction as a thing with its own structure. And Harold Garfinkel and ethnomethodology gave them the method. Treating ordinary practices as a topic of empirical study rather than a resource to take for granted.

**Sarah:** And the central C A claim.

**Kiffer:** That ordinary conversation is the bedrock form of human social interaction, and that it's structured by orderly, demonstrable, describable practices that speakers and hearers themselves orient to. The order is not imposed by the analyst. It's produced by the participants and is visible in the recording. That's why C A has such a demanding evidentiary standard. A claim about conversational structure has to be defended by showing that participants themselves treat the structure as relevant. Usually by attending to what they do when the expected structure is breached.

**Sarah:** And C A is the most empirically conservative of the three strands. C A practitioners are reluctant to make claims about psychological interiors, social structures, or even meanings in the abstract. They stay close to what's demonstrably going on in the talk itself.

**Kiffer:** Right. That conservatism is sometimes criticized as narrow. It's also why C A findings have proven unusually transportable. The structures C A documents in everyday English conversation have been found, with adjustments, in dozens of other languages and settings.

**Sarah:** Strand two. Critical discourse analysis.

**Kiffer:** C D A is, by contrast, the most expansive of the three. It emerged in the late nineteen eighties and nineties from the work of Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Teun van Dijk, and a small number of others. C D A is openly normative. Its commitment is not just to describe how language is used but to expose how language sustains, naturalizes, and reproduces relations of power and inequality. It's the strand most often used in health-policy research, in critical public-health work on stigma and racialization, and in the analysis of media coverage of health topics.

**Sarah:** And Fairclough's three-dimensional framework is the standard exposition. Text, discursive practice, social practice.

**Kiffer:** Right. Dimension one, text. The analyst examines the linguistic features of a specific instance of discourse. Vocabulary, grammar, metaphor, pronoun choice, modality. Dimension two, discursive practice. How the text was produced, distributed, and consumed. The institutional processes that shape who gets to say what to whom. Dimension three, social practice. The wider social, political, and economic relations that the discursive practices contribute to reproducing or contesting.

**Sarah:** And C D A is sometimes criticized for the looseness of its evidentiary standard. Where C A can point to participant orientation as evidence that a structure is real, C D A often relies on the analyst's interpretive judgment that a textual feature is doing political work.

**Kiffer:** Right. The defense is that C D A doesn't pretend to be neutral. Its commitments are explicit. And the evidentiary discipline lies in offering enough textual and contextual detail that another competent analyst can evaluate the reading. The trade-off is between empirical conservatism, which is C A, and theoretical reach, which is C D A.

**Sarah:** Strand three. Discursive psychology. The smallest of the three but the most theoretically distinctive.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. Originated in Britain in the nineteen eighties with Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell. The move is to take what looks like a psychological topic, memory, attitude, emotion, prejudice, identity, and ask how it's discursively constituted in talk. Rather than treating loneliness as an internal state that participants more or less accurately report on, the discursive psychologist asks what work participants do with the word, in what conversational positions, with what consequences.

**Sarah:** And for the running loneliness corpus, discursive psychology might be the most useful of the three when you encounter passages where participants are clearly doing identity work and face management around the admission of being lonely.

**Kiffer:** Right. How participants account for their loneliness in ways that manage blame. Theirs, others', structural. How they construct themselves as the kind of person who is or is not properly lonely. How they pre-empt skepticism with prefaces like, this is going to sound dramatic, but. How they perform an identity of being-reasonable about a stigmatized experience. The unit of interest is what loneliness does as a category in talk, not what loneliness is as a state in the mind.

**Sarah:** Why does a loneliness researcher, or any qualitative health researcher, care about all this?

**Kiffer:** Three reasons. First, the interview is a conversation. Almost every claim a qualitative study will make is grounded in a transcript whose features were jointly produced by interviewer and participant. The participant's answer to question seven cannot be properly understood without attending to what question seven did to position them. Second, loneliness is a stigmatized topic. Multiple participants do recognizable face-work around the admission of being lonely. Pre-empting judgment. Accounting for it. Distancing themselves from a lonely identity. A discourse-analytic reading shows the work the participant is doing to remain a reasonable interlocutor while admitting something they consider potentially discrediting.

**Sarah:** And third?

**Kiffer:** Third, the public-health conversation about loneliness is itself a discursive formation. When the U K appoints a Minister of Loneliness, or when C D C frames social isolation as a public-health crisis, those moves produce loneliness as a particular kind of object. A measurable population-level phenomenon amenable to programmatic intervention, rather than, say, a moral signal of community failure, or a structural consequence of late-capitalist housing. C D A is well equipped for that level of analysis.

**Sarah:** Okay. Let's spend some real time on conversation analysis, because as you said, it's the strand where the analytic moves transfer most directly. The core machinery is four bodies of structure. Turn-taking, adjacency pairs, preference organization, repair. Plus sequence organization on top.

**Kiffer:** Right. Let's start with turn-taking. The Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson paper from nineteen seventy-four, usually called S S J, is one of the most cited articles in twentieth-century sociology. It addressed a question everyone had assumed was uninteresting. How do speakers manage to take turns in conversation?

**Sarah:** And the empirical observation is that despite the apparent looseness of ordinary talk, in practice conversations show remarkably little overlap, typically less than five percent of speech time, and remarkably short gaps between turns, typically less than two hundred milliseconds. Something is keeping the system orderly, and the participants are doing it themselves in real time.

**Kiffer:** Right. The S S J model has three components. First, talk is organized into turn-construction units, T C Us. Bits of speech that on their own count as a complete contribution. A word, a phrase, a clause, a sentence. Whether something is a T C U is decided locally by the speakers, not by grammar. What matters is whether the current speaker has produced something that listeners hear as possibly complete.

**Sarah:** Second, at the end of each T C U there's a transition-relevance place, a T R P, where speaker change becomes a live possibility.

**Kiffer:** Right. And third, the rule system at each T R P works as follows. The current speaker may select the next speaker by addressing them or asking them a question. If not, any other speaker may self-select. If not, the current speaker may continue. These rules apply recursively at every T R P. The model predicts and the data confirm that overlaps will cluster around T R Ps where multiple speakers try to take the next turn, rather than randomly throughout speech.

**Sarah:** Now the adjacency pair. The most analytically productive unit in C A.

**Kiffer:** Schegloff and Sacks in nineteen seventy-three defined an adjacency pair as a sequence of two utterances that are adjacent, produced by different speakers, ordered as a first-pair-part and a second-pair-part, and typed. A given first-pair-part requires a particular type of second-pair-part. The classic pairs are question-answer, greeting-greeting, invitation-accept-or-refuse, request-grant-or-refuse, offer-accept-or-refuse, complaint-apology-or-rejection, assessment-agreement, compliment-acceptance-or-deflection.

**Sarah:** And the conditional relevance property is what gives adjacency pairs their analytic power. A first-pair-part makes a particular second-pair-part conditionally relevant, meaning the absence of the relevant second-pair-part is itself a noticeable, accountable event.

**Kiffer:** Right. If A greets B and B doesn't greet back, B hasn't merely failed to do something. B has done something specific. Snubbed, ignored, perhaps not heard. The conditional-relevance property specifies what the next speaker is now obliged to do, and makes any departure from that obligation interpretable.

**Sarah:** And interview transcripts are saturated with adjacency pairs, because interviews are organized exchanges of question-and-answer.

**Kiffer:** Right. Take the opening of a loneliness interview. Interviewer says, tell me about yourself. Participant, Helen, says, well dear, I'm seventy-eight, never married, no children, I was a librarian at the central branch downtown for thirty-eight years. The first-pair-part is a request-for-self-description. The conditionally relevant second-pair-part is a self-description. Helen produces one. What's analytically interesting is the form of the self-description. A structured list answer. Age, marital status, parental status, occupation, length of tenure. The form is not in the question. The question was open. Helen is doing something. Producing a recognizable biographical idiom that signals competent participation in the interview genre.

**Sarah:** And the adjacency-pair frame helps us see Helen's answer as a specific kind of compliance with a specific kind of solicitation, not just as content. A different participant might have produced a feeling-state report, a current-moment description, a refusal of the genre.

**Kiffer:** Right. Now preference organization. For adjacency pairs that allow more than one type of second-pair-part, invitations that can be accepted or refused, assessments that can be agreed or disagreed with, requests that can be granted or refused, C A documents a robust pattern. One type is preferred and the others are dispreferred. And preference here is not a psychological term about what speakers want. It's a structural term about the form of the turn.

**Sarah:** Walk me through the features.

**Kiffer:** Preferred second-pair-parts tend to be delivered without delay, structurally simple, no preface, no qualification, and contiguous with the first-pair-part. Dispreferred second-pair-parts tend to be delayed, often by a pause or a discourse marker like well or uh, prefaced with markers that signal an unwelcome answer is coming, like I'd love to but, accounted for, and mitigated in form.

**Sarah:** And the loneliness transcripts give us a perfect example. Maya, the twenty-two-year-old. Her closing line.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. She says, I just, I wish we could opt back in. Like a button you could wear that says I'm okay to talk. Pause. Sorry, that's a weird answer. The pause and the explicit account, sorry that's a weird answer, are textbook dispreferred-turn features. Except this isn't a second-pair-part to an adjacency pair. It's a self-evaluation of Maya's own answer. Maya is treating her own utterance as if it were dispreferred and preempting the dispreference by doing the apology and account in advance.

**Sarah:** Which is what discursive psychology would call face-work. Managing the social acceptability of her own talk before the interviewer can negatively evaluate it.

**Kiffer:** Right. The C A frame gives us the vocabulary to name the form of the move. The discursive-psychology frame helps us understand why she's making it. Loneliness is a stigmatized topic. Suggesting strangers should wear buttons inviting conversation is potentially read as weird. The two frames layer.

**Sarah:** Now repair. C A's term for the practices speakers use to deal with trouble in talk.

**Kiffer:** Right. Trouble in hearing, in understanding, in producing the right word, in maintaining the conversational alignment between participants. Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks in nineteen seventy-seven established the basic framework. Repair is everywhere. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson estimated that in ordinary English conversation, some form of repair occurs roughly every minute and a half.

**Sarah:** And repair is classified along two dimensions. Who initiates and who performs. That gives four types.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. Self-initiated self-repair. The speaker notices their own trouble and fixes it. I went to the, I drove to the store. The most common form. Other-initiated self-repair. The recipient signals trouble, sorry who, what did you say, and the original speaker fixes it. The second most common. Self-initiated other-repair. The speaker signals trouble, the one with the, you know, the thing, and the recipient supplies the fix. Common in long-running relationships. And other-initiated other-repair, where the recipient both signals and supplies the fix. The rarest, because it has the force of a correction.

**Sarah:** And repair is also organized by position relative to the trouble source. First-position repair occurs within the same turn. Second-position in the next turn. Third and fourth-position later. The closer to the trouble source the repair happens, the less interactionally costly it is.

**Kiffer:** Right. Take Robert's account in the loneliness corpus. He says, my ex caught me drinking by myself last summer on a Wednesday afternoon and that was, uh, that was a bad moment. The uh, that was sequence is a first-position self-initiated self-repair on the assessment he's producing. He's begun, that was, hesitates, deploys an uh, and re-starts. This isn't a repair on a word he forgot. It's a repair on the kind of evaluation he's about to give of the event. The hesitation is the work of choosing how to characterize the moment. C A reads it as a sign that more than one characterization was available and the speaker is selecting among them. The selection, a bad moment, is itself a reduced form. An understatement. And the repair sequence is the speaker calibrating that understatement in real time.

**Sarah:** Okay. And then sequence organization on top of all that. Pre-sequences and insertion sequences.

**Kiffer:** A pre-sequence is an adjacency pair that prepares for a subsequent action. The classic example is the pre-invitation. What are you doing Saturday? This is not actually a question about Saturday. It's a check on whether the conditions for an invitation are favorable. If the response is, nothing, why, the invitation comes next. If the response is, oh I'm busy, the invitation will not be issued and the would-be inviter has been protected from the social cost of a refusal.

**Sarah:** And insertion sequences are adjacency pairs embedded inside another pair.

**Kiffer:** Right. Want coffee. Decaf or regular. Regular. Yes please. The middle pair is inserted between the offer and the acceptance because the acceptance depends on the answer to the inserted question. In interview data, insertion sequences are everywhere because interviewers routinely ask clarifying questions before the participant has completed their answer.

**Sarah:** And the prefaces participants use, this is going to sound dramatic but, this is going to sound silly but, this is going to sound naive but, function like pre-sequences. They pre-position the listener to receive the upcoming utterance as one whose dramatic-ness is being acknowledged and managed by the speaker.

**Kiffer:** Right. The frequency of those prefaces in the loneliness dataset is itself a finding about how lonely people manage their conversational standing while reporting their loneliness.

**Sarah:** Let me ask about transcription. Because C A depends on transcript granularity in a way that intelligent-verbatim transcripts can't easily support.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. The transcripts students work with are typically intelligent-verbatim style. The conventions are: include all words the participant said, remove false starts that obscure meaning, remove filler words, standardize punctuation, smooth pauses into ellipses or em-dashes, ignore overlap, ignore in-breaths, ignore prosody. Intelligent verbatim makes transcripts readable and is appropriate for thematic, narrative, and content-analytic work. It strips out almost everything C A needs.

**Sarah:** And that's where Jefferson notation comes in.

**Kiffer:** Right. The conventions Gail Jefferson developed across her career, collected most authoritatively in her two thousand four piece, try to render in writing the features of talk that matter for interactional analysis. The full system has more than thirty conventions. A working subset of about a dozen captures most of what an analyst needs.

**Sarah:** Walk me through the basics.

**Kiffer:** Period in parentheses is a micro-pause. Less than point two seconds but audible. Number in parentheses, like point eight, is a timed pause in seconds. Equals signs mark latching. One turn follows another with no gap. Square brackets mark overlap, where two speakers are talking at the same time. Dot-h-h is an audible in-breath. H-h is an audible out-breath. Underlined word is emphasis. Capital letters is increased volume. Degree signs are quieter than surrounding speech. Up-arrow and down-arrow mark pitch rise or fall. Colons mark sound stretch. Dash at the end of a word is a cut-off.

**Sarah:** And for the capstone, the move is to take a passage from an intelligent-verbatim transcript and re-transcribe it in Jefferson style, inferring pauses, emphasis, and prosodic features from the context.

**Kiffer:** Right. Now you wouldn't do this in a real C A study. In real C A you transcribe from the audio. Inferring Jefferson features from an intelligent-verbatim source is a teaching exercise, not a methodological standard. The point is to develop the analytic sensibility that makes you attend to interactional features.

**Sarah:** Let me walk through a worked example. The intelligent-verbatim version from Maya, lines twenty-three to twenty-five, reads, how do you know when you're lonely, like what does it feel like? And the participant says, it's, okay this is going to sound dramatic, but it feels like being hungry. Like, in my chest. It's a physical thing. I get this feeling especially at night where my chest just feels, hollow isn't the right word, it's like an ache.

**Kiffer:** Right. And the plausible Jefferson re-transcription, inferring conservatively, marks an eight-tenths-of-a-second pause before the answer, which is the marker of a dispreferred turn. She's preparing to say something she anticipates will be received as excessive. The mid-turn cut-off, it's, followed by a half-second pause and the preface, okay this is going to sound dramatic but, is a self-initiated pre-emptive face-management move. The emphasis on chest, rather than on hungry or physical, localizes the felt experience anatomically. She's doing the work of giving loneliness a body part. And the repair, hollow isn't the right word, it's like an ache, is a first-position self-initiated self-repair on her own lexical choice.

**Sarah:** The intelligent-verbatim transcript records what was said. The Jefferson re-transcription records how it was said and what the saying was doing in real time.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. The two are different analytic artifacts. And one of the things students take away from this lesson is that transcription is itself an analytic act. The conventions you adopt determine what's visible to later analysis.

**Sarah:** Okay. Goffman. The dramaturgical framework.

**Kiffer:** Erving Goffman is the figure C A's founders learned from and then exceeded. His Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, nineteen fifty-nine, is the foundational text of the dramaturgical perspective. The claim is that social interaction is best understood through the analogy of theatrical performance. Actors stage carefully managed versions of self for audiences whose readings of those performances constitute the actor's social reality.

**Sarah:** And the core distinction is between front-stage and back-stage.

**Kiffer:** Right. Front-stage is where the actor is visible to the audience and works to maintain a coherent, presentable, role-appropriate self. Back-stage is where the actor relaxes from the demands of the performance, prepares for the next front-stage moment, and is available to a different audience of fellow performers. The clinic consulting room is front-stage. The staff room is back-stage. The interview itself is front-stage. What the participant says to a friend after the interview is back-stage.

**Sarah:** And for interview research, that distinction is consequential. Participants are always to some degree performing. Producing a presentable version of self for a sociological audience whose evaluations they cannot directly perceive but whose existence they know about.

**Kiffer:** Right. And Goffman's insight is that the performance-character of the encounter is not a flaw to be controlled for, but a constitutive feature to be analyzed. What kind of self is the participant trying to present? What audience are they presenting it to? What back-stage versions might exist?

**Sarah:** And then face and face-work.

**Kiffer:** Face is the public self-image a person claims in an interaction. Face-work is everything the participant does to maintain that face against threats. Their own missteps, the recipient's potential disapproval, the difficulty of the topic. Reading the loneliness interviews through a face-work lens makes a great deal of the transcript newly visible. Maya's sorry-that's-a-weird-answer is face-work. Robert's I'm-not-a-feelings-guy preface to a discussion of his emotional response is face-work. Helen's structured list answer is also face-work. She's presenting a person whose loneliness is empirically grounded in describable daily activity, not a person who's performing a complaint.

**Sarah:** And then footing, which is Goffman's later term for the participant's alignment to the utterance they're producing.

**Kiffer:** Right. A speaker can be the animator, the one physically producing the talk. The author, the one whose words they are. Or the principal, the one whose position the talk represents. Footing shifts are diagnostic of how the speaker is relating to their own talk. Robert's I-m-not-a-feelings-guy is partly a footing claim. He's positioning himself as an animator who doesn't normally produce the kind of talk he's about to produce, and inviting the interviewer to read what follows as out-of-character.

**Sarah:** And the dramaturgical framework has been particularly productive in the discourse-analytic study of clinical interaction.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. John Heritage and Doug Maynard and others have produced a body of work on the conversational organization of medical encounters. The clinical encounter has a distinctive turn-taking structure. The three-turn I R E pattern. Initiation, response, evaluation. Borrowed from the analysis of classroom talk. The physician asks. The patient answers. The physician evaluates the answer and asks the next question. And it has a distinctive distribution of face-threats. Patients are routinely required to discuss embarrassing, painful, or stigmatized topics. Physicians routinely deliver bad news or refuse requests.

**Sarah:** And then there's a contemporary literature on telehealth, where the conversational dynamics differ in identifiable ways. The visual channel is partial. Gaze is altered by camera position. Side-talk by other people in the room is more frequent. Technical trouble interrupts turns.

**Kiffer:** Right. Those features have real implications for how clinical C A findings transfer to telehealth contexts and for the design of telehealth services in public-health programs. Discourse analysis is doing applied work here.

**Sarah:** Okay. Now Fairclough's C D A framework, in operation. Walk us through how a C D A analysis would actually work on a public-health text.

**Kiffer:** Sure. Take a single sentence from a typical federal public-health document on loneliness. Loneliness has been identified as a significant public health concern. A C D A reading attends to the passive construction. Identified by whom? The nominalization. Loneliness as a thing, rather than as something experienced by particular people in particular conditions. The modal-adjective significant. Significant to whom, by what standard? And the framing as concern. An emotional-administrative category, rather than as suffering or as injustice. The textual choices add up to a particular construction of what loneliness is and who is positioned to act on it.

**Sarah:** That's dimension one. The text. Dimension two.

**Kiffer:** Discursive practice. The processes by which the text was produced, distributed, and consumed. Who drafted the document? Which experts were consulted? Which were not? What other texts does it cite, and which does it not cite? Who's the imagined reader? Through what channels is it distributed? How is it taken up by news media, by clinicians, by the populations it claims to address? This is where C D A most departs from C A. Instead of staying close to the text, it traces the text's institutional life.

**Sarah:** And dimension three.

**Kiffer:** Social practice. The wider context. Political-economic conditions, demographic patterns, historical trajectories of how the topic has been constructed in public discourse. For loneliness, the social-practice analysis would attend to the housing market, the labor market, the privatization of care, the post-two-thousand-eight economic patterns that have made multigenerational living more economically necessary and more culturally fraught, the differential burdens on immigrant and racialized populations, the gendered distribution of unpaid care work. The text is a moment in a much larger field of social practice. C D A reads the text against that field.

**Sarah:** An operating C D A analysis doesn't give equal weight to all three dimensions. It builds an argument that moves through them.

**Kiffer:** Right. A short paper might examine a single text in detail at dimension one, trace its production and uptake briefly at dimension two, and locate it within a broader social-practice argument at dimension three. The discipline is to make all three layers visible enough that another analyst could disagree with you on specific points.

**Sarah:** Let's land the practical piece. The week ten milestone is a Jefferson-style re-transcription plus a five-hundred to seven-hundred word interactional memo.

**Kiffer:** Right. Pick a five to fifteen line passage from the corpus. Produce a Jefferson re-transcription with pauses, emphasis, cut-offs, and any other features you can confidently infer from the intelligent-verbatim source. Then write an interactional memo that names at least two adjacency-pair structures, identifies any dispreferred-turn features, locates any repair sequences, and reflects on what the discourse-analytic reading made visible that thematic coding had missed.

**Sarah:** And the memo is doing real work. It's not just a re-transcription with commentary. It's an argument about what the interactional features tell you about how the participant is doing the work of being interviewed about loneliness.

**Kiffer:** Right. And there's a real limitation to acknowledge in the memo. The dataset is not built for conversation analysis. The transcripts are intelligent-verbatim composites. Real C A is done from audio. Your Jefferson features are inferred. The point of the exercise is to develop interactional sensibility, not to claim you've produced a valid C A transcript. Be transparent about that constraint.

**Sarah:** Okay. Let's pull this together. Seven takeaways.

**Kiffer:** Sure. First, discourse analysis treats transcripts as records of action rather than as containers of content. The unit of interest shifts from what the talk says to what the talk does.

**Sarah:** Second, there are three principal strands. Conversation analysis is empirically conservative and stays close to participant orientation. Critical discourse analysis is openly normative and traces text-to-society linkages across three dimensions. Discursive psychology takes psychological categories as discursive achievements rather than as internal states.

**Kiffer:** Third, the conversation-analytic apparatus has four core structures. Turn-taking organized through T C Us and T R Ps. Adjacency pairs with conditional relevance. Preference organization marking dispreferred turns through delay, preface, account, and mitigation. And repair, classified by who initiates, who performs, and at what position relative to the trouble source.

**Sarah:** Fourth, Jefferson notation renders the features of talk that intelligent-verbatim transcription erases. Transcription is itself an analytic act. The conventions you adopt determine what's visible to later analysis.

**Kiffer:** Fifth, Goffman's dramaturgical framework, front-stage and back-stage, face and face-work, footing, gives complementary apparatus for thinking about interaction as performance and the management of self-presentation.

**Sarah:** Sixth, Fairclough's three-dimensional C D A framework, text, discursive practice, social practice, is the standard scaffolding for analyses that move from linguistic features through institutional production to wider social-practice critique.

**Kiffer:** And seventh, for stigmatized health topics like loneliness, discourse analysis surfaces things thematic coding can't. The pre-faces, the dispreferred-turn features, the face-work, the footing shifts are all doing visible interactional work. They're not noise around the content. They're part of what the participant is communicating.

**Sarah:** And one meta-point. The interview is a conversation. Every claim a qualitative study makes is grounded in a transcript jointly produced by interviewer and participant. A discourse-analytic layer helps you see your own role in producing the data, which is a kind of methodological humility that's worth carrying forward.

**Kiffer:** Yeah. The honesty about the interview as performance is itself the rigor.

**Sarah:** That's a good place to land. Next time we move to analytic induction, qualitative comparative analysis, and decision models. Three different formal-comparative approaches that pick up where matrix work and grounded theory left off.

**Kiffer:** Right. Lesson eleven is the rigor-of-comparison lesson. Q C A in particular has been quietly influential in implementation science and policy evaluation. Worth knowing.

**Sarah:** Thanks for joining us today.

**Kiffer:** Take care everyone. We'll see you next time.