Steven Clayman

About

Steven Clayman is a professor in the UCLA Sociology Department with a focus on the organization of human interaction and its interface with social institutions. His research primarily examines interactions between journalists and politicians in broadcast news interviews and presidential news conferences, exploring how these interactions are organized and what they reveal about journalistic norms, press-state relations, political communication systems, and sociopolitical contexts. Beyond this domain, he investigates how interaction functions in various institutional environments and occupational settings, including medicine, law, public safety, and commerce. His broader interest lies in conversational interaction as a fundamental form of sociality and self-other relations. Clayman holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has authored significant works such as 'The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air' and 'Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and Institutions.' His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, notably studying the evolution of questioning in presidential news conferences.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• Communication
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• You know as invoking alignment: A generic resource for emerging problems of understanding and affiliation

  Journal of Pragmatics · 2021 · 39 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mandarin ethnomethodology or mutual interchange?

  Discourse Studies · 2018-02-01 · 35 citations

  articleSenior author

  Contributors to the 2016 Special Issue of Discourse Studies on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ (EoE) claim that studies of epistemics in interaction (how participants display orientations to their own and others’ states of knowledge) have lost the ‘radical’ character of groundbreaking work in ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA). We suggest that the critiques and related writings are a kind of mandarin EM, lacking an adequate definition of ‘radical’, other than to invoke brief and…

  PublisherDOI

• The Micropolitics of Legitimacy

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2016-12-30 · 25 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  When journalists elicit opinion and policy pronouncements from politicians, this engages a two-dimensional struggle over (1) where the politician stands on the issue in question and (2) the legitimacy of that position. Using data drawn from broadcast news interviews and news conferences, this paper anatomizes the key features of political positioning questions and their responses, and documents a tension surrounding relatively marginal or extreme views that tend to be treated cautiously by polit…

  PublisherDOI

• Conversation Analysis and the Study of Sociohistorical Change

  Research on Language and Social Interaction · 2021 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  We reflect on the affordances and challenges of interactional data in the analysis of long-term institutional change. To this end we draw on our studies of direct encounters between journalists and politicians in news interviews and presidential news conferences and in particular the use of question design as a window into the evolution of journalistic norms and press-state relations over time and the causal antecedents of such change. All analyses that incorporate a concern with environing cont…

  PublisherDOI

• Polar Questions, Response Preference, and the Tasks of Political Positioning in Journalism

  Research on Language and Social Interaction · 2018-04-03 · 23 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Polar questions encode grammatical and sometimes social preferences for a particular answer. This article examines the use of such preferences in journalism and in particular within political positioning questions aimed at revealing where politicians stand on salient issue and policy debates. Positioning questions are geared to three distinguishable tasks: (a) proffering the recipient’s position for confirmation, (b) eliciting comment on others’ positions, and (c) proposing a mainstream or trend…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• The Evolution of Questioning in Presidential Press Conferences

  NSF · $180k · 2001–2003

Frequent coauthors

• John Heritage

  36 shared

• Marc N. Elliott

  RAND Corporation

  16 shared

• Laurie McDonald

  Royal Hospital for Sick Children

  13 shared

• John Heritage

  University of California, Los Angeles

  7 shared

• Laura Loeb

  3 shared

• Virginia Teas Gill

  3 shared

• Douglas W. Maynard

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  3 shared

• Chase Wesley Raymond

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation (2001-2003)

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