Gossip Discourse as a Social Practice Amongst the Elderly

This book is designed to investigate the underexplored phenomenon of gossip with an emic perspective in a nursing home in Türkiye, where the body of research on gossip so far is limited to quantitative questionnaire data or participant perception-based interview data. The book adopts an ethnomethodological approach, and the analysis draws on Sack`s conversation analysis, to shed a light on the topics of gossip at a micro-analytic level. The contextual sequence analysis, draws the attention to the ways in which elderly interact non-institutionally in an institutional context, and how they place themselves as experts in the society by the aid of their active use of language (i.e. gossip), by focusing on topics of gossip, gossip as an element of appraisal, gossip as a connection tool, teacher`s fluid identity, use of proverbs, and the existence of religion-morality in gossip talk.