AIDA is a qualitative method of analysis developed by Karen Tracy for studying talk or text in communicative situations. As a discourse analytic method, its home is the research area of Language and Social Interaction (LSI), though it has also been used in research areas such as argumentation and interpersonal, group, and organization communication. Its aim is to reconstruct and make arguments about discourse practices that reveal and manage communication challenges people face in identified situations, specifically how those practices shape the normative ideals about that situation. AIDA’s roots are in discursive psychology, interactional sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis, all of which influence four interrelated key features. One is that the data for analysis is typically recorded and transcribed talk. Analysis considers not just what people say but also how they talk and interact with other speakers. Details of talk and interaction such as overlapping speech, pauses, repetition, false starts, emphasis, intonation, and sound particles (e.g., “uh,” “mhm,” “uhuh”) have potential analytic significance. Decisions about how much to record and how detailed to make the transcription are influenced by three other key features of AIDA: the naming of discourse/communication practices, its rhetorical-normative impulse, and the usefulness of ethnographic background. Naming a discourse/communication practice helps frame the situation in which it is found. AIDA’s rhetorical and normative impulse is that it assumes communicators seek to achieve multiple goals in articulated situations which inevitably compete and therefore create interactional problems and challenges, often in the form of dilemmas. Furthermore, those goals invariably involve displaying the self and altercasting others’ identities in some group, institutional, or community context. Thus, some moral compass, or normative guide, shapes how people manage those goals and seek to achieve them. Ethnographic background in forms such as field notes, interviews, and institutional documents helps situate the practice under study and is necessary for interpreting the transcribed talk. Like decisions about transcription amount and detail, the type and amount of ethnographic background will be influenced by articulation of the practice, the situation of interest, and the relevant group, institution, or community. AIDA is an inductive approach that may nonetheless be guided by theoretical concepts. Nascent hunches born with fitting theoretical concepts (e.g., as face/facework, politeness theory, membership categorizing, argumentation concepts) may furnish—to varying degrees—a project using AIDA, but AIDA ultimately seeks to formulate theoretical propositions or new and interesting claims about situated communication practice. This bibliography begins with a collection of articles about AIDA’s theoretical orientation, grounded practical theory (GPT), followed by overview articles about AIDA and book-length research studies featuring AIDA. It also includes a collection of journal articles using AIDA, organized into two groups. One foregrounds the reconstruction of communication practices, while the other foregrounds interaction challenges.
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