Topical Profiling

Abstract

This research profiles the topics of everyday talk, pinpointing topical patterns that are emergent, co-occurring, and relationally defining. Participants reported topics of their conversations with particular types of people (e.g., parents, significant others, bosses, professors, service people, etc.). The most commonly emerging topics were those most central to participants’ lives and that helped them “check in” with (i.e., update) and “check out” from (i.e., depart) others. Topics co-occurred to carry out conversational routines (e.g., starting and ending), fulfill communicative functions (e.g., informing), and achieve interpersonal agendas (e.g., comforting). Topics differed in their absolute prospects of arising within particular relational types and in their relative prospects of arising across relational types. The relational type was predictable more than 45% of the time by knowing only which topics occurred (and which did not). The profile of people’s topical talk is one of patterns in the topics that arise in their lives, that co-occur in their conversations, and that define their relationships.