Recent moves in psychology to use people's talk as data have been highly productive, but we should look carefully at the way the context of such talk is reproduced when the research is published. It can easily be shown how context is stripped out of reports of experiments and questionnaire studies, but we argue that even discursive analyses risk systematically underestimating the dialogicality of people's talk, and hiding the researchers' part in its production. We put the flesh on the notion of `dialogicality' by using Levinson's updating of Goffman's concept of footing. This is a useful tool that reveals how participants occupy shifting positions, and how reported speech is a far from transparent record of the original utterance.
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