Teaching single-case analysis in methods courses

[Leila Monaghan]

Nice question, Nate!  My first instinct when using single case analyses is
to look at their theoretical outlook.  Many, including much of the work of
Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks and other practitioners of Conversation
Analysis, are using single cases to argue for universal practices in such
unconscious phenomena such as turn taking, the organization of laughter, how
overlap works.  Michael Moerman in his work on Thai legal proceedings showed
that careful transcription brings up exactly the same sort of phenomena in
Thai as in English, the main language of the Conversation Analysis folk.  In
my own work on Deaf communities, I have found that medium makes a difference
here.  It is common to give a continuous low level feedback in ASL
conversations in a way not done in spoken conversations (although if we
expanded the definitions of spoken conversations to include head nodding and
other non-verbal responses, I think we could find more examples).



As you point out, CA studies have a lot in comment with the performance and
folklore literature.  All are event based work and as such often have a lot
in common with Dell Hymes’s take on events, his SPEAKING model.  He too
looks for larger patterns but in his case connects up single cases of events
with Genre, the G of the SPEAKING model.   Any single example is an example
of a larger genre but as genres are much more culturally variable no
specific case can be as universal as the cases examined in CA work.



I also think there is a solid dose of “appreciation of beauty or uniqueness”
in the analysis of performances and folklore.  Looking at one example will
let you have a sense of how a single pattern plays out and the intricacies
of a particular piece of verbal or other kind of art.  While there is a lot
of discussion of emergence in performance, seeing change happening before
eyes, I find these discussions unpersuasive because to really see change you
need two, and preferably at least three points in time.  One point does not
make a line.


all best,


Leila


On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Nathaniel Dumas <
ndumas at linguistics.ucsb.edu> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I hope all is well. Do any of you have experience in teaching single-case
> analysis* and its relationships to phenomenon-based analyses, primarily in
> methodology courses? If so, what have your experiences been in teaching why
> one should consider it, how to (not) do single-case analysis, and how to
> read/evaluate published single-case analyses?
>
> Feel free to respond to me offline at ndumas at linguistics.ucsb.edu.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Nate
>
> *By “single-case analysis,” I’m referring mainly to Emanuel Schegloff’s use
> of the term in his 1987 article, “Analyzing Single Episodes of Interaction.”
> Even though this term comes from CA, my observations are that a lot of
> performance and folklore research uses, to varying degrees, the idea of
> single-case analysis.
>



-- 
Leila Monaghan, PhD
Department of Anthropology
University of Wyoming
Laramie, Wyoming