A Practical Guide to Conversation Research: How to Study What People Say to Each Other

Abstract

Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have allowed researchers to more directly and precisely examine conversations in natural contexts and at a larger scale than ever before, and these advances open new paths to understand humanity and the social world. Existing reviews of text analysis and conversation research have focused on text generated by a single author (e.g., product reviews, news articles, and public speeches) and thus leave open questions about the unique challenges presented by interactive conversation data (i.e., dialogue). In this article, we suggest approaches to overcome common challenges in the workflow of conversation science, including recording and transcribing conversations, structuring data (to merge turn-level and speaker-level data sets), extracting and aggregating linguistic features, estimating effects, and sharing data. This practical guide is meant to shed light on current best practices and empower more researchers to study conversations more directly—to expand the community of conversation scholars and contribute to a greater cumulative scientific understanding of the social world.

Verbal behavior and the future of social science.

“…Given the highly social nature and functions of verbal behavior, social context seems to be one of, if not, the most relevant situational factor that can be explored and exploited by NLP researchers today. 10 Surprisingly, computerized language analysis research rarely takes social factors into account, despite its near-universally recognized importance (Boyd & Schwartz, 2021;Yeomans et al, 2023). However, recent innovations in conversational theory may help to energize and empower NLP scholars to integrate contextual features into psychological accounts of verbal behavior, including contemporary thinking about group settings as dynamic situations that demand individuals adapt their verbal behaviors in response to interpersonal and group needs and motives (Gerpott et al, 2019;Kane & van Swol, 2022;Yeomans et al, 2022).…”

Language Style Matching Without Interaction: Consuming Entertainment Media from Someone Unlike You is Engaging

“…While much research in the psychology of language tradition has used words as a lens into the individual mind (Boyd & Schwartz, 2021;Kennedy et al, 2022;Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010), a nontrivial portion of this field has also considered how language patterns in social interaction associate with downstream social, psychological, and behavioral outcomes (Benamara et al, 2018;Chang & Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, 2019;Yeomans et al, 2022Yeomans et al, , 2023.…”