Joint remembering: Constructing an account of shared experience through conversational discourse

Abstract

The object of study is the ways in which people construct a joint account, in conversational discourse, of a particular common experience. The data source is the recorded conversation of a group of eight people who are recalling together the substance and storyline of the feature film “E.T.,” which they had all recently seen. Conversational joint remembering is described in terms of three hierarchically related functions: (1) framing and orientation—the establishment of criteria for joint recall, and the ways in which individuals accordingly locate themselves vis‐à‐vis the unfolding account; (2) correspondence functions—including a “semantic function” through which experiences are put into words, and a “continuity function” which concerns the ordering of things recalled; and (3) validation function—a variety of means by which the joint account is constructed as a mnemonic consensus, jointly agreed. These three functions and their subcomponents are derived from a qualitative, content‐oriented treatment of raw dialogue. The discussion highlights the importance of studying remembering as a social activity governed by the settings in which it occurs, serving a potentially large set of personal and interpersonal functions in which the significance of past experiences for current purposes is generally of greater importance than accuracy and completeness, the usual criteria in psychological studies.