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Bryman: Social Research Methods: 3e

Chapter 20

http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/sitemenu.htm
This is an excellent, interesting and highly informative website all about the practice of conversation analysis (CA). It has been written by Charles Antaki at Loughborough University, and provides an invaluable beginner’s guide to the method. From this home page you can follow the links to find out more about the basic principles of CA, how to interpret and use the notation symbols when analysing a transcript, and some worked examples from a CA-based study.

http://www.iub.edu/~cwp/lib/cabib.shtml
Here is a useful page of links to various academic articles about the theory and practice of CA. It has been compiled by staff at Indiana University and includes excerpts from both classic theoretical works (such as Sacks, Goffman and Grice) and some more contemporary studies that demonstrate how CA has been applied to various substantive topics in the social sciences. The list helpfully contains a short summary of each article and the bibliographic reference to help you find them.

http://www.socresonline.org.uk/3/2/1.html
This a very interesting article about the use of audio-visual recordings in CA research. The authors, Lomax and Casey, report on their study of situated interactions between midwives and clients, and consider the extent to which the presence of a video recorder (and indeed the researcher) creates 'reactive effects' in the people being studied. They include extracts of data that remind you of the notation symbols used in CA transcription, and you can play audio clips of the same conversations to see how the whole process works. Well worth a visit!

http://extra.shu.ac.uk/daol/
This is the homepage of a relatively new online journal dedicated to the theory and practice of discourse analysis (DA). Edited by a team at Sheffield Hallam University, it contains a range of interesting articles that you can browse from the current and previous editions of the journal; these include 'themed issues' on topics such as feminist DA.

http://www.criticism.com/da/lw_da.html
For the more theoretically minded amongst you, this essay discusses the impact that the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein have had upon the development of DA. It is written by Steven M. Hoenisch and forms part of a web site on critical theory; however, this is an accessible and user-friendly piece to read and may help you to understand some of the linguistic principles that inform DA.