In my bachelor project we worked together with humanities students on a thorough analysis of a record conversation between a coach and two of his clients. The analysis was a deep study of the things that come into play when people communicate with each other.
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Interpersonal Interaction
Case Study
Keywords on the topics that we worked with in this project: communication, turntaking, speech acts, nonverbal communication, facework, and many others.
The Task
“Så længe vi alle er glade” was my bachelor project at the Informatics study. In English the title means: “As long as we are all happy”. The project group consisted of 3 Informatics students and one humanities student. The project was an analysis of a coaching conversation that we were given permission to record on film. We then selected some sections of the film that we then transcribed and evaluated based on different theoretical approaches.
Qualifications
This project was an eye opener for me as I realized some of the many factors that come in to play when people talk to each other. This could be rules for turntaking, speech acts, nonverbal communication, facework and the balance of power between those communicating. It was very interesting to investigate the deepest aspects in such a conversation and it provided me with a deeper understanding of how people interpret each other and of course how we as observers of such a conversation easily may interpret i many different directions. Finally this deep analysis also made me much more aware of how people communicate in my everyday life.
Results
The result of this project was a description of our interpretation of what happened during the coaching conversation. We described how the individual people tried to direct the conversation in each their direction but we also found elements that made it problematic for the coach to complete his job.
