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Schegloff (1999) offers the following story about an aphasiologist (someone who deals with speech disorders caused by dysfunction of the language areas of the brain):

[W]hile engaged in testing aphasic patients, he would ordinarily use rest periods during which patients had a coffee to go and check his mail, etc. One day he happened to join the patients in the coffee room during the break and was astonished to hear the patients doing things while talking amongst themselves or with relatives which they had just shown themselves to be ‘unable’ to do in the preceding test session. (1999, p. 431)

This story nicely demonstrates the potential benefits of a focus on what people do in the context of their everyday lives. By using audio and video recordings and observations of ‘naturally occurring’ interactions over interviews, or experiments, or imagining you already know, you can gain a different perspective on people’s actions and interactions.

Recently, there has been a turn away from relying solely on interview- or focus-group-based data. The problem for some researchers is that with this type of data you are relying solely on participants’ self-reports or accounts of what they do. As Strong (1980) notes, just prior to his insightful analysis of interviews with doctors about their treatment of alcoholic patients:

One further aside. No form of interview study, however devious or informal, can stand as an adequate substitute for observational data. The inferences about actual practice that I or others may draw from those interviews are therefore somewhat illegitimate. My excuses must be that at present we have no better data on the treatment of alcoholic patients and that, more generally, I have at least attempted to ground myself as fully as possible in these few observational studies of medical consultations that have so far been undertaken. Whether all this is a sufficient guide to the specific matter of practice with alcoholics must remain an open question for the moment. (1980, pp. 27–8)

I am inclined to agree with Strong’s version. For me, an interview or focus group study that only uses participants’ accounts to understand people’s day-to-day practices seems problematic.

The interview or focus group may be an economical means, in the sense of time and money, of getting access to an ‘issue’. It may also be an economical means of getting access to issues that are not easily available for analysis, to get people to ‘think out loud’ about certain topics. However, having said this, most topics are ‘freely available’ for analysis. As Holstein and Gubrium (1995) note, to understand the topic ‘family’ we do not need to interview people or enter people’s homes. We can see how ‘family’ is organized, produced and negotiated on the bus, in supermarkets, in newspapers, in talk-shows, in legislation, and so on. The point is, whether it is an interview, a focus group, or an observation of an office or supermarket, you should be sensitive that people’s actions and interactions are contextually situated. By contextually situated I simply mean that we massively shape our actions and interactions to ‘fit with’ (and so reproduce) the, often unspoken, norms, rules and expectations of the specific context we find ourselves in. You only have to think of how you behave differently in a church or classroom from in a pub or at a friend’s house, or how you recount the same story in different ways to different friends or different members of your family, to get a sense of what contextually situated might mean. Also, you just know at a glance when someone is behaving ‘oddly’ in a situation; this sense of oddness may in part emerge from their breaching the expectations of what is appropriate conduct for that context.

It is important to note what people mean when they say that they prefer to focus on ‘naturally occurring’ interaction. Some people take it to mean that you should only use data that is not researcher-led or researcher-prompted. With this reading you would not be interested in working with interview or focus group data, but rather only be interested in recording and analyzing occasions that would take place if you were not present. With this line of argument the Holy Grail is to use only video and audio data that is (reasonably) untainted by any researcher’s actions. Short of using hidden cameras or microphones and never being present at the scene, this is an impossible dream. The rise of ubiquitous computing may alter this, as wearable recording devices become more miniaturized and routine features of life. Lifebloggers, people who wear recording devices to capture and distribute all aspects of their unfolding lives are at the forefront of this. However, as numerous studies of interaction have shown, the emergent properties of an encounter are intimately related to a whole range of facets of that scene and this includes the presence of ‘silent witnesses’, like cameras or microphones (see, for example, Speer and Hutchby, 2003).

However, what I take a focus on naturally occurring activity to mean is that you should try to discover how some action or interaction – be it a police interrogation or a qualitative interview – occurs as ‘natural’, normal or routine. So, rather than only asking a focus group moderator about how they run focus groups, you can gain a good understanding of ‘how they run focus groups’ through some form of recordings of them actually running focus groups. Equally, rather than asking counsellors about how they counsel, you may want to base many of your observations on recordings of them actually doing some counselling. From this perspective, researcher-led information – from interviews or other sources – is still of use in trying to describe how counsellors do counselling, or how focus group moderators run focus groups. However, the primary source of data would often be audio or video recordings of what they actually do as they do it. When analyzing both the recordings of counsellors in action and the interviews with them about their specific practice, you would obviously take into account how your actions and any recording equipment impacted on the ongoing encounters.

So the call for naturally occurring interaction in this sense means that, no matter what sources of data you are relying on, your main interest would be generating a sense of how the specific thing you are interested in routinely occurs or ‘comes off’ as it does. As such, researchers interested in these types of studies have focused on a vast range of practices, from how Tibetan monks discuss logic, how neurobiologists dissect rats, how qualitative interviewers ask questions, to how people disagree when talking to friends. All this work is, at the very least, based around observations and/or audio or video recordings of these practices as they occur. And in the chapters that follow, I will further unpack how to generate and work with audio- and video-based data.