Christian Heath is Professor of Work and Interaction at King's College London. He is known for his research in which he uses video to analyse social interaction in everyday settings in particular the workplace.
Christian Heath is Professor of Work and Interaction at King's College London. He is known for his research in which he uses video to analyse social interaction in everyday settings in particular the workplace.
In 1977 Heath was appointed Research Fellow in the Department of General Practice, University of Manchester working with the late Professor P.S Byrne. In 1986 Heath published Body Movement and Speech in Medical Interaction which drew on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to analyse multimodal communication in the general practice consultations, including the physical examination, the opening and closing of the consultation and the use of medical records and early computers.
In 1988 while continuing research on medical interaction, including studies of diagnosis, the expression of pain, and the management of embarrassment, he was granted leave from the University of Surrey firstly to undertake an Alexandra von Humboldt Stiftung Fellowship at the University of Constance with Thomas Luckmann and then to become a visiting senior fellow at the EuroPARC, (the European base of Xerox PARC at that time) in Cambridge. With Paul Luff he explored the interactional foundations of technology use in a variety of settings, including architectural practices, medical consultations and the control rooms of London Underground. These projects and the collaboration with Paul Luff led to the organization of the Work, Interaction and Technology (WIT) Research Group, now Research Centre. Since 1998 WIT has been based at King's College London.
In 2000 Heath published Technology in Action [1] which addressed diverse issues including collaborative production of news stories, teamwork in traffic control, and the interactional incongruities that arise in media spaces and virtual environments. These studies became part of the emerging fields of Workplace Studies and CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) and contributed to knowledge of embodied action and multimodal interaction in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Heath's research was undertaken in close collaboration with industry and the public services; the results were used in the design and development of paper-digital technologies, media spaces and virtual environments, and also in the creation of systems to enable event recognition for European transport operators including London Underground and the RATP Paris.
In the late 1990s, Heath continued to study work and organisation, medical and healthcare settings and auctions of art and antiques. He collaborated with Dirk vom Lehn, Jason Cleverly and colleagues at WIT, to examine communication in museums, galleries and science centres, focussing on how people engage and respond to exhibits and exhibitions through social interaction. The programme of research involved close collaboration with museums and galleries in the UK and abroad including the Science Museum London, Tate Britain, the V&A and the Exploratorium San Francisco.
In 2010, with Jon Hindmarsh and Paul Luff, he published Video in Qualitative Research, an introduction to using video analysis in the study of social interaction in everyday life. [2] [3]
Since 1998 Heath has also been series editor with Roy Pea and Lucy Suchman of the Cambridge University Press book series Learning and Doing: Social Cognitive and Computational Perspectives.
A Festschrift was held for Christian Heath at the University of Bayreuth in 2012.
In 2013 Heath published The Dynamics of Auction: Social Interaction and the Sale of Fine Art and Antiques. [4] [5] It was awarded the Prize for the Best Book (2010-2014) by the International Society for Conversation Analysis.
In 2014, Christian Heath was presented with the EUSSET-IISI Lifetime Achievement Award - awarded to scholars for an outstanding contribution to the reorientation of the fields of computing and informatics. [6]
In 2014 he became a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars [7] and was granted the Freedom of the City of London in 2015. [8]
He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. [9]
Erving Goffman was a Canadian-born American sociologist, social psychologist, and writer, considered by some "the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century".
Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is the study of how people utilize technology collaboratively, often towards a shared goal. CSCW addresses how computer systems can support collaborative activity and coordination. More specifically, the field of CSCW seeks to analyze and draw connections between currently understood human psychological and social behaviors and available collaborative tools, or groupware. Often the goal of CSCW is to help promote and utilize technology in a collaborative way, and help create new tools to succeed in that goal. These parallels allow CSCW research to inform future design patterns or assist in the development of entirely new tools.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction that empirically investigates the mechanisms by which humans achieve mutual understanding. It focuses on both verbal and non-verbal conduct, especially in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with a focus on casual conversation, but its methods were subsequently adapted to embrace more task- and institution-centered interactions, such as those occurring in doctors' offices, courts, law enforcement, helplines, educational settings, and the mass media, and focus on multimodal and nonverbal activity in interaction, including gaze, body movement and gesture. As a consequence, the term conversation analysis has become something of a misnomer, but it has continued as a term for a distinctive and successful approach to the analysis of interactions. CA and ethnomethodology are sometimes considered one field and referred to as EMCA.
Ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction. It generally seeks to provide an alternative to mainstream sociological approaches. In its most radical form, it poses a challenge to the social sciences as a whole. Its early investigations led to the founding of conversation analysis, which has found its own place as an accepted discipline within the academy. According to Psathas, it is possible to distinguish five major approaches within the ethnomethodological family of disciplines.
In the fields of sociology and social psychology, a breaching experiment is an experiment that seeks to examine people's reactions to violations of commonly accepted social rules or norms. Breaching experiments are most commonly associated with ethnomethodology, and in particular the work of Harold Garfinkel. Breaching experiments involve the conscious exhibition of "unexpected" behavior/violation of social norms, an observation of the types of social reactions such behavioral violations engender, and an analysis of the social structure that makes these social reactions possible. The idea of studying the violation of social norms and the accompanying reactions has bridged across social science disciplines, and is today used in both sociology and psychology.
Jonathan Potter is Dean of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University and one of the originators of discursive psychology.
Harold Garfinkel was an American sociologist and ethnomethodologist, who taught at the University of California, Los Angeles. Having developed and established ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology, he is probably best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), a collection of articles. Selections from unpublished materials were later published in two volumes: Seeing Sociologically and Ethnomethodology's Program. Moreover, during his time at University of Newark, which became Rutgers University, and enrolled in Theory of Accounts, a course that covered accounting and bookkeeping procedures. Where from this class "even in setting up an accounting sheet, he was theorizing the various categories into which the numbers would be placed" which furthered his understanding of accountability.
Microsociology is one of the main levels of analysis of sociology, concerning the nature of everyday human social interactions and agency on a small scale: face to face. Microsociology is based on subjective interpretative analysis rather than statistical or empirical observation, and shares close association with the philosophy of phenomenology. Methods include symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology; ethnomethodology in particular has led to many academic sub-divisions and studies such as micro-linguistical research and other related aspects of human social behaviour. Macrosociology, by contrast, concerns the social structure and broader systems.
Paul Dourish is a computer scientist best known for his work and research at the intersection of computer science and social science. Born in Scotland, he holds the Steckler Endowed Chair of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he joined the faculty in 2000, and where he directs the Steckler Center for Responsible, Ethical, and Accessible Technology. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, the ACM, and the BCS, and is a two-time winner of the ACM CSCW "Lasting Impact" award, in 2016 and 2021.
Sociology is the scientific and systematic study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. Regarded as a part of both the social sciences and humanities, sociology uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. Sociological subject matter ranges from micro-level analyses of individual interaction and agency to macro-level analyses of social systems and social structure. Applied sociological research may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, whereas theoretical approaches may focus on the understanding of social processes and phenomenological method.
Steve Whittaker is a Professor in human-computer interaction at the University of California Santa Cruz. He is best known for his research at the intersection of computer science and social science in particular on computer mediated communication and personal information management. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and winner of the CSCW 2018 "Lasting Impact" award. He also received a Lifetime Research Achievement Award from SIGCHI, is a Member of the SIGCHI Academy. He is Editor of the journal Human-Computer Interaction.
John Heritage is Professor of Sociology at University of California at Los Angeles. He is one of the key figures in the approach known as conversation analysis.
Scott Gates is an American political scientist and economist based in Norway. He was director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)'s Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW), which was a Norwegian Center of Excellence funded by the Research Council of Norway for a twelve-year period 2002-2013. He is currently a Research Professor at PRIO, a Guest Researcher at ESOP in the Department of Economics at the University in Oslo and also holds a professorship in the Department of Political science at the University of Oslo. He used to work at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Michigan State University (MSU).
Sara Beth (Greene) Kiesler is the Hillman Professor Emerita of Computer Science and Human Computer Interaction in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a program director in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences at the US National Science Foundation, where her responsibilities include programs on Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, Smart and Connected Communities, and Securing American Infrastructure. She received an M.A. degree in psychology from Stanford in 1963, and a Ph.D., also in psychology, from Ohio State University in 1965.
Martyn Hammersley is a British sociologist whose main publications cover social research methodology and philosophical issues in the social sciences.
Pushkala Prasad is an Indian American academic, researcher and writer. She is the Zankel Chair Professor of Management and Liberal Arts at Skidmore College. She is best known for her book Crafting Qualitative Research: Working in the Post-Positivist Traditions and her research on workplace diversity. A great deal of her work is done in collaboration with her husband, Anshuman Prasad.
Biographical research is a qualitative research approach aligned to the social interpretive paradigm of research. The biographical research is concerned with the reconstruction of life histories and the constitution of meaning based on biographical narratives and documents. The material for analysis consists of interview protocols (memorandums), video recordings, photographs, and a diversity of sources. These documents are evaluated and interpreted according to specific rules and criteria. The starting point for this approach is the understanding of an individual biography in terms of its social constitution. The biographical approach was influenced by the symbolic interactionism, the phenomenological sociology of knowledge, and ethnomethodology. Therefore, biography is understood in terms of a social construct and the reconstruction of biographies can give insight on social processes and figurations, thus helping to bridge the gap between micro-, meso-, and macro- levels of analysis. The biographical approach is particularly important in German sociology. This approach is used in the Social Sciences as well as in Pedagogy and other disciplines. The Research Committee 38 "Biography and Society" of the International Sociological Association (ISA) was created in 1984 and is dedicated "to help develop a better understanding of the relations between individual lives, the social structures and historical processes within which they take shape and which they contribute to shape, and the individual accounts of biographical experience ".
Anne Warfield Rawls is an American sociologist, social theorist and ethnomethodologist. She is Professor of Sociology at Bentley University, Professor for Interaction, Work and Information at the University of Siegen, Germany and Director of the Harold Garfinkel Archive, Newburyport, MA. Rawls has been teaching courses on social theory, social interaction, ethnomethodology and systemic racism for over forty years. She has also written extensively on Émile Durkheim and Harold Garfinkel, explaining their argument that equality is needed to ground practices in democratic publics, and showing how inequality interferes with the cooperation and reflexivity necessary to successfully engage in complex practices.
Video Data Analysis (VDA) is a curated multi-disciplinary collection of tools, techniques, and quality criteria intended for analyzing the content of visuals to study driving dynamics of social behavior and events in real-life settings. It often uses visual data in combination with other data types. VDA is employed across the social sciences such as sociology, psychology, criminology, business research, and education research.
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