Abstract

This paper explores the problems of collecting relevant and accurate information about the way people refuse offers and invitations. After discussing a range of ways in which refusals have been collected by previous researchers in this area, a small study is described which was designed to compare the kinds of refusals elicited by three different methods of data collection: audio recording of face-to-face interaction in an authentic social context, oral role play, and written discourse completion task (DCT). It was found that the refusals elicited using the first two methods were relatively similar on a number of dimensions, while the written DCT data was rather different. It is concluded that, while written DCTs are useful for eliciting what people know about socio-pragmatic norms, routines and stereotyped ways of ‘doing refusals’, they should not be used to provide information on how people actually ‘do’ refusals in face-to-face interaction.

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