Moving forward with membership categorization analysis: Methods for systematic analysis
By Elizabeth Stokoe. 2012
546 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This article has four aims. First, it will consider explicitly, and polemically, the hierarchical relationship between conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). Whilst the CA ‘juggernaut’ flourishes, the MCA ‘milk float’ is in danger of being run off the road. For MCA to survive either as a separate discipline, or within CA as a focus equivalent to other ‘generic orders of conversation’, I suggest it must generate new types of systematic studies and reveal fundamental categorial practices. With such a goal in mind, the second aim of the article is to provide a set of clear analytic steps and procedures for conducting MCA, which are grounded in basic categorial and sequential concerns. Third, the article aims to demonstrate how order can be found in the intuitively ‘messy’ discourse phenomenon of membership categories, and how to approach their analysis systematically as a robust feature of particular action-oriented environments. Through the exemplar analyses, the final aim of the article is to promote MCA as a method for interrogating culture, reality and society, without recourse to its reputed ‘wild and promiscuous’ analytic approach.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b44bd4489fcd35792e0dbde2cd9b95400885a732
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Citations in the corpus
- How to get a grip on identities-in-interaction. (What) Does "Positioning" offer more than "Membership Categorization"? Evidence from a mock story (2013, background): “Conversation analysts have started only rather recently to deal with membership categoriza tion within the methodological framework of CA (Schegloff, 2007a, b; Stokoe, 2012a).”
- Formative Interventions for Expansive Learning and Transformative Agency (2016, unknown): “Related to ethnomethodological membership categorization analysis (Hester & Eglin, 1997; Lepper, 2000; Stokoe, 2012), longitudinal categorization analysis is aimed at identifying durable sea changes in a community rather than minute short-term variations in individuals or small groups.”
- Interactional problems in research interviews (2014, background): “Although their application to research interviews is not without controversy (Nikander, 2012), these include conversation analysis (CA; Sacks, 1995; Schegloff, 2007) and membership categorization analysis (MCA; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002; Jayyusi, 1984; Stokoe, 2012).”
- Editorial: Positioning in narrative interaction (2013, methodology): “The conversation analytic approach to identities in talk relies on the concept of ‘membership categorization (Sacks, 1972; Schegloff, 2007; Stokoe, 2012).”