A Linguistic Approach to Studying Quality of Face-to-Face Communication

Bringing together concepts from previous research in linguistics, social psychology and service quality, this paper explores new grounds in the pursuit of an approach for studying quality in face-to-face communication in service encounters. Audio and video recordings are used to study communication by transcribing verbal and non-verbal behaviour in the recorded activities. It is believed that contextual characteristics are the main determinants of communicative behaviour in service encounters. In order to evaluate instances of good and poor quality, these characteristics are translated into communicative concepts that are traceable in the transcriptions.