Sociology Question

Post ID: 3462326

Overview

The transcript shown below and accompanying video for this assignment are the same as those used for Assignments 1 and 2. The assignment relates primarily to material covered in Lectures 11-14, but you may also find that material from earlier lectures and assignments usefully informs your analysis. The task for this assignment is to build on your analysis from Assignment 2 by considering the features of turn-taking and sequence organization in the moments preceding C’s use of Pn-adequate categories in lines 37-38. That is, our focus here is on how is it that C came to produce that turn/action in the context of this interaction, and at just this moment in this interaction. Specifically: 1. Provide a brief analysis of: a. Turn-taking related features that can be observed in lines 16-30. b. Features of the sequence (adjacency pair) lines 16-30 are part of. 2. Provide a brief analysis of the immediate sequential context(s) for C’s action at lines 37-38, and the turn-taking features it involves. That is: a. What is C initiating or responding to in producing this action? b. What would be expected to happen at this moment, in terms of the expectations associated with turn-taking and sequence organization and in light of the “institutional” (or setting- based) task at hand, compared to what actually does happen here? c. How does this (further) inform our analysis (Assignment 2) of what C is doing with her use of Pn-adequate categories in this sequential context, and in light of the setting-based omni-relevant category of which she is a member in the interaction? Please also note the following: • In writing up your analyses, please keep in mind that (as you were asked to do in previous assignments) you should, wherever possible, a) use evidence to support your claims (e.g., line numbers or brief quotes from the transcript), and b) specify how it is that the evidence (line numbers/quotes) you are pointing to serves as evidence in support of your claims. • Your analyses need not be exhaustive in order to earn full credit. That is, you do not need to say everything that could possibly be said in relation to the above questions, as long as what you do say addresses the questions and is well-supported by the evidence you point to. • As noted in for previous assignments, in keeping with the collaborative approach we wish to foster in this course, you are encouraged in developing your responses to the above questions to share ideas with us and your classmates – both during group office hours and in your own time. However, your submission should be written independently, in your own words, and should not be simply a copy or a slightly-altered version of someone else’s submission. In brief, the rule for collaborating is work together, but write alone! If you are in any way uncertain about how to apply this rule in practice, please consult with us for further guidance. The word limit for this assignment is 500 words. Please check the word count on your answers before submitting, as penalties will be applied for submissions that exceed this limit. (Also note that is entirely possible to earn full credit for the assignment without writing as much as 500 words, so you need not feel obligated to use this full allowance.) The assignment is due by 11:59pm on Monday, November 17, and should be submitted using the link provided on Canvas. Early submissions are welcomed

SOC 136C, Data Transcript for Assignments 1-4 [Hill; Soda Thieves Call] 1 CT: >Tallahassee police department Emily speaking, how may 2 I help you< 3 C: H:i I need three teenagers removed from my store right away, 4 (1.8) 5 CT: Where: is your sto:re. 6 C: The Burger King on (Tennessee) Street, it’s (.) ten sixty 7 West Tennessee? 8 (1.0) 9 CT: And you’re the employee there? 10 (0.2) 11 C: >I am the stor-< w=I’m: thu::h assistant manager. 12 (0.7) 13 CT: And what’s the name of the sto:re? 14 (0.5) 15 C: Burger King, 16 CT: Burger King. And what are they doin’. 17 (0.8) 18 C: (Alright.) Well, (1.0) for one they’re not listening they’re 19 causing a big scene out front becaus:e I: (.) caught one of 20 ‘em stealing soda:? 21 (0.2) 22 C: And refused to dump out the cu::p. 23 (0.2) 24 C: And I told him >over and over again no matter< what it 25 is the:ft. 26 (0.4) 27 C: And he said he didn’t ca:re. 28 (0.2) 29 C: .h=So now he’s fighting with me and refuses to leave. 30 (2.8) 31 CT: #O:ka:y#=h U:h: males, females, black=whi:te, 32 (0.2) 33 C: Male black about six foot. 34 CT: All o[f em?] 35 C: [All ]three of em. Yep! 36 (0.8) 37 C: An’ I’m like a five foot little white girl, so it’s li:ke 38 .h hh .h they’re not gonna listen to me no matter what I say. 39 (4.8) 40 CT: .h (.) All:: right.=We’ll get somebody out there as soon 41 as we can.=They’re inside right now? 42 C: Yep! 43 CT: Ao:kay we’ll get somebody out there. 44 C: >Thank you.< 45 CT: >Uh huh buhbye.< 46 ((click)).

NOTES:

Question: How are social categories used in sociological theories and research?

For selecting settings and/or people to study and in describing features of settings and people being studied

Recruitment research studies have participation criteria
Describing features in a setting
Categories: age, race, gender, etc.

For studying identities or experiences shared by members of a group

Generational category
Set of experiences associated with it

For dividing populations to compare groups; and thus as predictors of and/or explanations for differential actions or outcomes between groups

Eg: map of the US showing red/blue based off specific groups (if only females voted… mostly blue)

For describing and accounting for relationships, conflicts etc. between individuals or groups

Eg: how well are they getting along?...
Approval of marriage between blacks and whites, by race
Ideology and terror

Categories are a fundamental set of resources for action and inference in everyday life

This serves as a pervasive mechanism for their (re)production

In addition to using them in the main ways they do, sociologists could learn much about categories by more directly examining how ordinary people use them in everyday interactions

Relevance of distinctions between:

Sociology as (merely) confirming “lay” accounts, or competing with them vs. (also) studying them on their own terms
Using categories as a resource vs. examining categories as a topic and a participant’s resource
Taking the existence of categories as “social facts” for granted as a starting [oint for studying social phenomena vs. studying the processes through which categories are (re)produced as “social facts”

“You can study how children play in the sandbox… or you can jump in and join them”

Melvin Pollner (cf. our discussion of ex.1)

There may be pragmatic/ethical/political reasons for sociologists to use categories as resources for doing research (“jumping into the sandbox”)
There is also a need for the sociological study of how ordinary members of society use/ contend with categories

The EMCA approach:

EM=Ethnomethodology (ethno=folk/people; methodology= study of methods - SOC 185E
Applied to categories: study of people’s methods for using categories
Categories as participants’ resources: studying how people use categories, rather than using categories to study people
CA= conversation analysis (an approach to systematically studying conversation and other forms of talk-in-interaction)
EMCA approach to categories: studying how people’s uses of categories intersect with basic or “generic” interactional structures and practices

Studying interaction systemically

“How can I speak in such a way as to do something?” “What is the other speaker doing?”
“Which words can/should I use to say/do something?”
“When can/should I speak?”
“How should I respond to what the other speaker has done?”
“How do I deal with troubles deciding what to say and/or hearing and/or understanding what someone else has said?”

Some guiding themes:

Reciprocal relationship between categories and interaction: Interaction shapes categories and categories shape interaction
“Categories of categories” (especially “setting-based” versus other/”broader” categories”)
Category maintenance, category change, and category trouble

Methodological Challenges:

The “observer's paradox”: Do people talk/act differently when they know they are being observed (and esp. recorded)?

It is difficult to be 100% certain- but the same is so for interviews, surveys, experiments, etc.

“Capturability”: What if the category/ies of interest don’t become salient (or are only “fleetingly” so) in the data we are looking at?

If categories of interest are as important as sociologists assume, they should be readily capturable (in the wild)

What counts as a participant's orientation?

How do we know which categories are the ones participants in the interaction are oriented to, given that they may not be the same ones the researcher is interested in
Fine-grained case-by-case analysis is crucial

October 2, 2025

EMCA Approach

EM: Ethnomethodology

CA: Conversation Analysis

Studying interaction systematically

Themes: Interaction shapes categories and categories shape interaction

Categories of Categories”
Category maintenance (relevant?), category change, and category trouble

“The person cried; another person picked them up.”

“The Virgo cried; the point guard picked her up.”

“The baby cried; the mommy picked it up.”

We tend to hear:

The “mommy” is the mother of the baby
The mommy picked the baby up because it was crying
That these things are the case without knowing the specific mother and baby involved

Membership Categorization Devices (MCDs):

The term “membership categorization devices” refers to the combination of collections of categories (Lecture 3) and rules of application (Lecture 5)
Members of society treat categories not just as isolated/unrelated, but as “going together’ in sets/collections

Family
Gender
Stage of life
Occupation
Soccer

Duplicative Organization: Some collections constitute team-like “units”, with categories heard as being part of not just the collection, but the same unit/team (family, team, sports, etc.)
Positioned categories: Hierarchical positioning of categories in some collections, such that one member can be said to be higher or lower than another
Standardized Relational Pairs (SRPs): Paired categories associated with reciprocal rights and/or obligations

“Categories of Categories”

Pn-adequate collections

Collections that include categories that can “accurately” categorize every member of society at anytime and any interaction
Every language/culture/society has at least two “Pn-adequate” MCDs-sex, age; also e.g., race, sexuality, religion, etc.
Occupation is not Pn-adequate because not everyone has an occupation
Every person in any interaction can always potentially be categorized by more than one category from these collections
Accuracy of a categorization is not on its own a sufficient warrant for its use

Setting-based “omni-relevant” collections

Collections normatively tied to particular settings, such that they are always potentially relevant for organizing and interpreting actions of participants in the setting”

October 7, 2025

Omni-relevant
Pn-adequate collections may be “operative” with the setting-based collection or as a proposed alternative to the setting-based collection at particular moments

Wrap-Up: “Categories of Categories”

The more “local” or "immediate-to-the-interaction" (non-categorial) social-interactional positions that may become relevant through or for participants’ conduct at particular moments

Eg:

Questioner/ Answerer
Criticizer/Defender
Complainer/Compliant recipient
Caller/Called
Joker/Joke recipients/ joke targets\

Operate concurrently with or as alternatives to adequate and/or setting-based collections of categories at particular moments
An important implication: to fully appreciate the categorical features of interactions we should be attentive to setting-based “omni-relevent” categories and/or moment-by-moment social-interactional positions

Features of Individual Categories:

“Common sense” knowledge
“inference -richness”

What is known about the category is assumed to be so for any member of the category

Knowledge “protected against induction”

Observing that knowledge about a category is not so for a given member typically does not result in the knowledge about the category as a whole being modified; seen as “an exception”, “explained away”

Attribute category
Incongruently: physical appearances

Bases for action and interpretation

Common sense knowledge associated with categories enables categories to be used as central resources for designing actions
Interpreting/Accounting for other’s actions

October 9, 2025

Lecture 4 Wrap-Up

Common-sense knowledge about activities, attributes associated with specific categories
Stereotypes imply individual beliefs; common-sense knowledge is socially shared but not necessarily individually believed
Stereotypes are seen as something that people buy into
Stereotypes seen as necessarily/inherently inaccurate; common-sense knowledge is assumed to be accurate for the purpose at hand
Stereotypes are morally proscribed; seen as bad

Rules of Application

These are rules (norms) that participants systematically orient to/reproduce in their interactions
They are NOT rules that Sacks made up
Sacks referred to them as “relevance rules” they concern ways of seeing/hearing the relevance of particular categories

The economy rule

A single category from any MCD is, in principle, sufficient for categorizing a person
When more than one category is used we can consider what the speaker is accomplishing by doing this- what they are proposing about the relevance of the categories used

The consistency rule

If one person is categorized using a category from some MCD, then other categorized using applicable categories from the same MCD
Thus, the use of one category from a collection provides for the relevance of other categories from the same collection

The hearer’s maxim
The viewer’s maxim

If you see an activity being done that is category bound to a particular category and the person doing the activity can be seen as a member of that category, then see them that way

October 14, 2025

Participants treat categories not just as isolated/unrelated, but as “going together” in sets/collections
The term “membership categorization devices” refers to the combination of: collections of categories and rules of application

October 21, 2025

Interaction shapes categories and categories shape interaction
People use categories in forming actions and recognizing others’ actions
These uses of categories reproduce the common-sense knowledge associated with them
A specific aspect of word-selection- words we use for referring to or addressing ourselves and others
There are multiple forms of reference and address available
These choices can be grouped in two main ways:

Doing nothing beyond simply referring “default” “unmarked” “standard”
Using a person reference to accomplish something else interactionally beyond simply referring- “marked” “non-standard”, “non-default”

Three Main Types of Person Reference:

First person or self-reference (I, Me, My, Etc.)
Second person or recipient reference (You, Your, Etc.)
Third person reference

Recognitional- speaker knows person referred to and assumes recipient does too
Non-recognitional- speaker does not know person referred to and/or speaker assumes recipient does not know of them

Non-Recognitional Reference:

Since there are no dedicated terms for non-recognitional reference, categories are a pervasive resource for producing them
Non-categorial forms are possible

October 28, 2025

Recipient Reference:

Recall: unmarked forms for recipient reference include dedicated address terms (you, your, etc)
These may be individual or collective neither include categories by default, but they may be inferable from context of use
Other practices may be used to foreground categories without mentioning them
Categories can also be explicitly added

Individual Self-Reference:

Categories associated with a self-reference may be inferable from other features of the immediate interactional context
Speakers may use other self-reference practices to indicate the relevance of categories without mentioning them
Or they may use explicit mentions/claims of category membership

October 30, 2025

Studying Interaction systemically:

Turn taking

How do we know when someone has finished a turn?

Wait for them to stop speaking?
Speaker signals that they are done?

Ordinary/Informal conversational turn-taking is the most “unconstrained” form of interaction (it doesn’t involve formal institutional constraints”

This means:

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson model of turn taking:

Turns are constructed/ built out of “units”

TT in Institutional Talk

Involved systematic adjustments/ constraints of conversational turn-taking, including:

Different systems for allocating turns (by authority/pre-determined rules rather than fully participant-administered)
Different constraints/ expectations for turn length (possibility of”multi-unit” turns)
Explicit signals of turn completion.readiness for turn transfer

These are typically tied to setting-based omni-relevant categories

Turn-Taking Violations:

Violations of the expectations associated with turn-taking rules can come in various forms (whether conversational or institutional)

Self-selecting to speak next when someone else has already been selected as next speaker
Continuing to speak beyond the end of a unit of talk after having selected another to speak
Not speaking after being selected to speak next
Speaking when another participant is speaking (overlap)
Speaking when not a ratified participant in an interaction/in the current part of the interaction

November 4, 2025

TT Violations and “Interruption”

TT violations are commonly characterized as "interruptions"
“Interruptiuon” is commonly seen as an expression or abuse of power
Interrupter treated as blameworthy
Tend to be treated “category-bound” to powerful/hierarchical categories

November 6, 2025

Introduction to Sequences of Action

Adjacency Pair Sequences

Consist of:

A sequence of two actions- e.g., greeting-greeting, question-answer, etc.
Adjacently placed; that is, one after another
Produced by different speakers
These two turns are relatively ordered- First and Second Pair Parts/FPPs and SPPs

Provides a structure through which relevance of and/or membership in categories can be tacitly accomplished, shifted, etc.
Categories can also be more actively used as resources for doing actions in different sequential positions