Paper
Saturday, July 16, 2005
This presentation is part of : Following the NIH Roadmap: Building Collaborative Research Teams
Using Techniques of Conversation Analysis to Recognize Collaboration
Charon Pierson, PhD, APRN, FAANP, John A. Burns School of Medicine, Department of Geriatrics, University of Hawaii Department of Geriatric Medicine, Honolulu, HI, USA

Purpose: The objective of this study is to examine collaborative interactions among professionals within the framework of ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA). Background: While collaboration in the health care arena is conceived of as a process for accomplishing a task, it is also a social process informed by the common sense, taken-for-granted, “rules” participants have for how people work together. These social aspects of collaboration are largely missing from the medical and nursing literature and are seen more clearly in the ethnomethodological literature. Collaboration as a foundational concept in EM and CA has its own meaning, which differs from the meaning of collaboration related to the process of accomplishing a task within a work setting. In studies of collaboration within distributed work environment, researchers have concluded that collaboration is a social process, as well as a communicative process, characterized by information sharing, knowledge integration, management, and co-working. Methods: Field notes and verbatim transcriptions of video- or audio-taped multidisciplinary professional interactions were analyzed to show the ways in which interactions were organized to produce collaboration in some instances and non-collaboration in others. Results: Membership categories and membership categorization devices are some of the ways participants are able to display and account for professional roles in a multidisciplinary setting. Certain features of interactions, such as the medical case presentation, create boundary objects that, despite their identification with a specific discipline, can facilitate collaboration across disciplines. Co-presence of participants is a powerful bodily gesture that is noted particularly by its absence; bodily presence indicates commitment to the process is interpreted as collaborative. Universal and active participation is highly valued by collaborators. Through the various turns-at-talk, participants uncover what others mean and what their joint actions or accounts come to mean within the context of the collaborative venture.