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Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Linguistics and Translation, October 4-7, 1972, Montreal, Canada. (RS)

This paper is concerned with the meanings people attribute to social behavior in the various types of occasions of face-to-face interaction in which they participate. The view of meaning attribution to social behavior adopted here is broadly phenomenological. The basic tenet is that social reality is subjective. It is what the people who live it experience. It has the meanings they attribute to it. And people experience social reality--attribute meanings to the world around them--both in similar and in different ways. Accordingly, any theoretical model of meaning attribution to social behavior should provide the comparison constants in terms of which to account for variation in people's apprehension of experience. Three orders of questions are being addressed in this paper: (1) What theoretical constructs are needed to account for variation in interactants' apprehension of behavior in occasions of face-to-face interaction? (2) What types of variation are revealed by these theoretical constructs? and (3) What is the significance of these different types of variation? The approach to theory building adopted here is one in which "theory and method are associated in the sense that modes of data collection are regarded as having theoretical significance."

This article presents the reply of the author on comments about her research on face-to-face interaction. The author's stated goal is to account for/explain behavior in face-to-face interaction from the standpoint of the meanings attributed to this behavior by the participants themselves. Reactions to the stated goal was given. The author explained that her stated goal is unambiguously restrictive. It specifies what is within the scope of the theory and what is outside of it. In other words, the theory is not all-encompassing. According to the author, there are many aspects of human behavior that are not accounted for simply because the theory does not attempt to do so and not because the author consider such aspects as unworthy of theoretical consideration. Orders of comments pertinent to the stated goal of the theory but outside the focus of the paper include, comments relating to the literature, requests for a specification of the relation of theory and method, and requests for a detailed description of the technique. From the author's view, the process of building an empirically based theory of human behavior is a topic of inquiry for the social scientist that deserves consideration.

This article focuses on a theory of face-to-face interaction. The scope of the proposed theory was given. It was mentioned that the theory is anchored in naturally occurring behavior through the culturally bounded events, or scenes in which face-to-face interaction takes place. Such cultural events or scenes are called occasions of interaction. In an individual's life, a wide variety of occasions of interaction can be differentiated. Attention was given on familiar scenes of everyday activities in which direct face-to-face interaction takes place between strangers, acquaintances, or friends. From the author's point of view, the goal of the theory of behavior in interaction is to explain the nature of a behavior on the basis of its organization. Most of the analytic concepts proposed by the theory are believed to have absolute generality in the sense of applying to the investigation of behavior in everyday occasions of interaction in general. Some of these concepts, however, may be limited to mainstream Northern American culture. In a descriptive approach, observed behavioral patterns are explained on the basis of their being identified as a specific part of an organized whole. The analyst who adopts a descriptive approach accounts for social behavior by ascertaining its organization on the basis of notion believed to reflect its nature, such as structure and property.