ABSTRACT

The interactional exemplars herein offer only a sketch of Robert Hopper’s research, a small sampling of ordinary yet complex interactions we had the opportunity to share curiosity and concern about: phone openings, men talking about women, and conversations involving cancer. Drawn from larger sets of data, these materials provide seemingly endless analytic puzzles. These puzzles prohibit boredom while injecting regular doses of humility as the incessant search for “patterns” goes forward.