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further analysis of the conflict, other specifying stages of conflict may be required
in the interactions that are connected with the conflict. Examples of conflict that
might involve slightly different stages with regard to communication are a trial in
court, a political debate, a family quarrel, an argument in a work team, etc. The
considerations above, therefore, lead us to propose an activity-based approach in
order to identify typical or possible steps of conflict in the communicative spoken
interaction of different social activities.
3.5
An Activity-Based Approach to Interpreting
and Describing Stages of Conflict
We thus suggest that there is not only one correct answer to the issue of how many
stages of conflict escalation there are and what these stages are. Rather, we think
that the number and types of stages must be related to the type of conflict we are
concerned with. Therefore, different types of conflict may typically show different
numbers and stages with different properties.
We will illustrate and support this claim below by an analysis of the number
and types of stages found in short conflict episodes, occurring between politicians
in televised political debates from different countries (Germany, Italy, Greece, and
the USA). The debates involve different types of conflict episodes, characterized
by more or less aggressive, accusing, scornful, derisive, ironic, triumphant, defiant,
resigned, etc. stances and behavior.
An analysis of the “social signals” involved in these stances, i.e., the multimodal
expressions occurring at different moments in the conflict episodes has yielded a set
of clusters of behavior, which can be used for identifying possible stages, steps, or
phases in the different types of episodes.
In our analysis, we focus on the stances and behavior exhibited by the politicians,
rather than on, for example, the long-term consequences, which are the focus of sev-
eral of the models we have described above, for example, in Glasl's nine-step model.
This difference in perspective we think illustrates how different types of conflict also
enable a focus on different conflict affordances in the data and in this way may give
rise to different models of conflict escalation, suitable for different purposes.
3.6
Method
3.6.1
Material
In order to analyze and illustrate stages of conflict in televised political debates, we
have used a corpus consisting of four political debates occurring in three different
countries, Germany, Italy, and the USA:
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