similarities and differences DA-CA

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

According to the text, it would have four principal themes regard conversation and discourse analysis where they explain some differences and similarities.

Sociology’s priorities will be appearing in chapters on classic theoretical approaches and some methodological approaches and some methodological discussions, where will find topics such an education, gender, and social inequality, work, crime, criminal the justice system, religion and so on. However, psychologist tends to focus on the cognitive and development aspects of the language, it means that while sociology (discourse analysis) and psychology (conversational analysis) are distinctive because they focus explicitly on language as social action.

The data collection that sociological research uses is the informal or semi-formal interview where researchers solicit various kinds of discourse like reports, descriptions, anecdotes, and so on, nevertheless, the discourse data will be analyzed as a resource to allow the researcher to make claims about some non-discursive topics.

            So, conversation and discourse analysis are attentive to the properties of how language is actually used, therefore, the research question derives from observations on features plainly exhibited by the data. For example, Sacks and his colleagues’ careful transcription of talk-in-interaction revealed that were few gaps between turns, but in the other hand, they noted that although periods of overlapping speech were common, these were relatively short-lived. In this sense, they cannot approach their data with pre-established research questions in mind. In fact, it has become a distinctive feature of conversation.

            On the other hands, conversational analysis, and discourse analysis reflect and develop the concerns of ethnomethodology where is the sense of social action accomplished through the participants’ use of tacit, practical reasoning skills and competencies, these skills are referred to as "tacit" and "practical" because they are not the kinds of rules or norms of behavior which we could consciously articulate, or on which we would routinely reflect. Through this kind of influence (ethnomethodology) Sacks’ work was focused exclusively on the communicative competencies that informed ordinary, everyday conversation. In other words, we can say that ethnomethodology was central to their attempt to emphasize the implications for social psychology and its focus on the ways in which members achieve the sense of any particular event or moment.

            Another difference between discourse analysis and conversation analysis is that discourse analysis is a large slight affair dealing primarily with unimportant methodological matters while conversational analysis has attracted a more sustained critical inspection and sometimes generate extreme responses, also through CA researchers can study the power since by means of it the communicative competences facilitate the interact and complex interrelationship try to understand how power is presented in the classroom, home, in hospitals, at work, etc. All of this can allow the researchers to understand why or the reasons for humans’ behavior. Another aspect related to conversational the analysis is that verbal activities are coordinated with the level of detail like with the interaction, distinctive vocabulary of technical terms, so in other words, conversational analysis is focused more on the speaking or conversation and the way that it collects the data comes from everyday conversation, news, interviews, shows. While DA is more concentrated in language as social function and text and it is related to the linguistic, it means that discourse analysis is focused on the metaphors or figures of speech, and more in the writing discourse also taking into account the context. 

            As a conclusion, we could observe through this reading that conversational analysis and discourse analysis has some differences but at the same time some similarities since both of them are analyzing the communication and try to identify what is the real intention of the speakers in their discourse taking into account the tone of voice. Therefore, the methodological issues that conversation analysis is so different from the discourse analysis since in CA uses the analytic claims are generated from analysis of a collection of instances of a particular phenomenon, the organization of activities are explicated and warranted by analysis of the turn by turn, also both of them are distinctive in their focus on discourse/language use as a topic in its own right. 

            So, some similarities between CA and DA is that is the focus of empirical analysis, varying engagement with traditional disciplinary topics, and the range of empirical questions which are addressed, also they differ methodologically with respect to the range of intellectual influences, the kinds of data which are studied, the nature of analytic findings and the resources available to warrant empirical claims, and so on.