Abstract

Our research uses EMCA to investigate talk and interaction in the specialised professional setting of multinational crisis management training. In order to understand the participants’ situated actions, gaining knowledge that goes beyond what is observable in the ongoing interaction, e.g., of the military community and its prevailing norms and practices, and reaching a sufficient level of competency (“unique adequacy”) is crucial. Although EMCA traditionally refrains from making deductions based on anything but recorded data, additional information and data can still be gathered to complement and enrich the analyses. In this chapter, we discuss how studying UN Military Observer courses has invited us to develop our methodological thinking. We introduce a multi-layered, multiphase approach to data collection and analysis and highlight the benefits of ethnographic knowledge and the real-life “first-hand” experiences of us researchers, which we perceive as proto-data. Collecting and using complementary data have become constitutive elements at different stages of our research: when 1) refining research questions and objectives, 2) identifying interactional phenomena, and 3) carrying out analyses that would, in other cases, be inaccessible to the researcher. We also revisit two core concepts in EMCA, inductivity and unmotivated looking, and illustrate how they may be more holistically addressed.