People express themselves, based on the context in which they find themselves, in different ways. This study attempts to reach a fuller understanding related to how nursing students, through the vehicle of nursing talk, and in particular complaining talk, learn from and teach each other how to proceed through the system of school. Specific emphasis is placed on analyzing the nature of these nursing students' conversations in order to describe how they socially organize each other to do complaining talk.

Using as a basis Turner's (1976) principle that complaints are constructed across persons, over time, across many utterances, transcripts of the students' audiotaped sessions over a two year period were analyzed to determine and to describe how complaint sequences were organized among the members. To capture more specifically the nature of the complaint sequences, the analysis is organized around how the use of the pronominal form "it" in its most vague state could stand for being a potential candidate for getting lassoed back to particular versions of itself and consequently organizes a number of complaint sequences by the members.

This study is seen as an attempt to describe in some ways how nursing students do complaining talk. As a result, the study concludes that the "it" in these students' specific conversations could stand for "things to be complained about and/or the overriding thing to complain about," and that something as non-specific as an "it" turns out to have definite references among the members which consequently signals alot of information to the group members in terms of learning about the system of which they are a part.

It is important to note that through their complaining, which is highly specifiable in this setting of these particular nursing students getting together to talk about their situations, these students offer solutions and information to each other about how to proceed through the system in terms of particular adaptations and specifics related to the institutional order of the system of school and nursing.

The results of this study point to the need for further exploration using conversational analysis research models not only in the area of learning in schools of nursing, but in future studies of the educative role of complaining in other facets of human endeavors.