Social order and the construction of meaning in social interaction: Troubled communication between sighted and partially sighted/blind people.

摘要

This research contributes to discussion on Visual Impairment/Blindness, Ethnomethodology, Dramaturgy, and Conversation Analysis. Detailed inquiry on semi-structured interview, focus group interview, and videotaped interaction data were used to specify how conversational and interactional troubles occur during face-to-face social interaction between visual impaired/blind and sighted people. The goal of the research was to identify, analyze, and illustrate how an inability to attend to displayed/enacted socially recognizable embodied actions, normally employed during face-to-face social interaction as ordinary practice, lead to conversational and interactional trouble.;The work of Erving Goffman on face-to-face social interaction (e.g., self presentation, impression management, and moral obligation) generates knowledge on the social consequences of conversational and interactional trouble. Research of Harold Garfinkel, on the social practices produced in the local work of situated activity, was used to argue that visually impaired/blind people experience local social order differently, compared to sighted people. The work of Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson on turn-taking, was used to discuss how conversational and interactional troubles manifest in social exchanges.;Emphasis was placed on the methods members use to accomplish practical tasks in their ordinary everyday lived experience. Sighted people take sight for granted when participating in face-to-face social interaction. The ordinary methods and practices used by sighted people to participate in situated activity include the use of socially recognizable embodied actions that are turn-implicative. Data reveals the local work performed in order to achieve local social order and intelligibility in situated activity. Failure to attend to socially recognizable embodied actions, due to blindness, leads to turn-taking troubles. Turn-taking troubles lead to conversational and interactional disruption. Visually impaired and blind people take turns they have not been allocated, fail to take turns they have, and experience embarrassment. When this occurs in social scenes, people are unable to display their understanding of prior talk.;Audiotaped narrative data, collected in three states in the United States, was used to document troubles. Videotaped interaction data supported conjectures. Examining local order from the vantage point of the visually impaired and blind, using Ethnomethodology, makes the methods and practices ordinarily used to achieve intelligibility, analytically accessible.