Membership Categorization Analysis

Abstract

Membership categorization analysis (MCA) has its origins with the work of American sociologist Harvey Sacks in the 1960s. MCA has developed alongside conversation analysis (CA). Like CA, MCA is grounded in understanding social order as the ongoing achievement of practical actors who themselves are trying to understand how their world is organized. MCA research relies upon an analytic apparatus to learn more about members' procedures for positing and accepting or denying categories for both persons and actions. Contexts such as family, police interrogations, broadcast news, examination of ethnicity and gender as well as the impact of technology provide a researcher with omnirelevant categories, those culturally and socially known to the researcher. Within these contexts, conversational participants use devices including turn‐taking sequences, to establish the ways membership categories are built. Researchers use additional tools including: the consistency and economy rules, hearer's/viewer's maxims, and category‐tied predicates, to explicate relevant member categories.