Topic: Linguistic
Description:
The purpose of this assignment is to restage and extend Pamela Fishman’s classic study on gender asymmetries in the staging of conversations: P. Fishman (1978). Interaction: The Work Women Do. 25(4) Social Problems 397–406. Read carefully the article by Fishman (available on Blackboard in the Readings folder on the home page), focusing closely on her notion of conversational work and maintenance devices like attention getters, leading questions and ritualised rhetoric questions and closure devices like minimal responses and statements. Note her results of the striking gender asymmetries in the uses of various devices. All of her experimental subject couples were white, heterosexual, middle class and 25-35 years old. Your job is to test her results by restaging the study, looking at two couples. One couple should have been together for more than three months but less than a year, and the other couple should have been together for more than 5 years. The couples you choose can be white, youngish, middle class and heterosexual if you want, but it would extend the study in interesting ways if – for at least one of your couples – you can work with gay or lesbian couples, older people, working-class couples, or people of Asian, African or Aboriginal backgrounds. You should get your data from conversations between couples in Australian films or television series, past or present.
* Analyse the conversational data using the parameters of conversational work from Fishman’s study, looking for significant asymmetries of behaviour between the couple’s members. Does one member do more of the conversational work than the other? How does this fit in with Fishman’s findings? Is there a significant difference in behaviour between the two couples, so that length of time in the relationship is an important variable? (Does the old adage ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ have a ring of truth here?) You will need at least half an hour of informal conversational data from both couples in your study.
*You will also need continued access to this data for your next assignment