Article

Habits of the Hearth: Children's Bedtime Routines as Relational Work

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Abstract

Drawing from a corpus of naturalistic videotaped data documenting everyday activities of 32 middle-class dual-earner families in Los Angeles, California, this article explores children's bedtime routines as an interactional matrix for carrying out culturally salient relational work, illustrating how family members co-participate in a 'discourse of anticipation' that prepares for-yet simultaneously forestalls-the moment of bedtime separation. Integrating research from psycho-cultural studies, language socialization, and conversation analysis, the article builds upon prior work on everyday routines as rich vehicles for cultural learning, discerning and tracing how parents and children co-constitute bedtime activities as collaboratively negotiated closing routines that foster autonomous self-initiative in tandem with a growing capacity for relational communion with others.

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... Conversation-analytic papers on familial interaction have explored socialisation as an interactional co-constructed accomplishment and he en ion be een child autonomy and pa en con ol (Wingard, 2012, p. 574) in interaction (see Antaki & Kent, 2015;Fasulo et al., 2007;Kent, 2012;Sirota, 2006;Waring, 2019;Wingard, 2012). It is noteworthy that when discussing or investigating such ma e , i i he child a onom ha i in e iga ed and he pa en a ho i , b no he pa en a onom and he child a ho i . ...
... As families go about their daily lives, parents and children encounter the challenge of getting one another to participate in a multitude of tasks (Siitonen et al. 2021). Negotiating these, often parent-led, a k like ea ing dinne and ge ing d e ed i cen al o the organization of family life (Goodwin, 2006, p. 518) and has received a fair amount of attention from conversation-analytic scholars (for examples of task negotiation in the home see Aronsson & Cekaite, 2011;Fasulo et al., 2007;Goodwin, 2006;Sirota, 2006;Waring, 2020;Waring & Yu, 2017). In this chapter, I examine sequences of negotiation in parentchild in e ac ion, i h a foc on child en nego ia ion a egie of co n e ing pa en al requests. ...
... This research builds on the work of Goodwin and Goodwin (1987) on child en use of format-tying in arguments with their peers: children repeat the exact utterance of the prior speaker, using their own words against them during an argument (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987). Waring (2020) notes that children use counter-requests to resist eating during dinner-time routines, while Sirota (2006) p o ide e ample of bo h pa en and child en e of co n e -requests as bargaining manoeuvres in the negotiation of bedtime routines. Conversation-analytic studies, like those of Waring and Sirota, on family negotiations of parent-led tasks in the home, describe parent-child interactions involving parental requests and demands as a tug-of-war between children exercising autonomy and parents exercising the control necessary for task completion (Aronsson & Cekaite, 2011;Fasulo et al., 2007;Goodwin, 2006;Sirota, 2006;Waring, 2020;Waring & Yu, 2017). ...
Thesis
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As children and parents go about their daily lives, they initiate, engage in and complete various tasks around the home; and in the process of completing these activities, they encounter the challenge of getting each other to do things. Prior EMCA research has primarily focused on how parents get children to do things through the investigation of parent-initiated request-sequences and parental pursuits of compliance through demands, threats and touch. While I also focus on request and demand sequences, I examine how children initiate and pursue a course of action to get their parents to do things, thereby identifying previously unexamined methods that children use to exercise agency and authority in interaction with their parents. I do so by adopting an ethnomethodologically-informed conversation-analytic approach to studying child-parent interaction that emphasises the need to study participant orientations to the developmental scheme and to avoid making a priori assumptions about asymmetries in competence, agency and authority. The data corpus consists of 9 hours of video-recordings of child-parent interactions spanning 13 days. Data were collected from two volunteer families with four-year-old children who recorded their daily lives using smart nanny cameras. In an examination of parent-initiated request-sequences, I look at how children initiate an alternative sequence of action by countering their parent’s requests. I identify two types of counters; one that children can use to challenge a proposed task’s roles and another that replaces a parental course of action with the child’s. I also analyse child-initiated demand-sequences and children’s methods for pursuing parental compliance. I then focus on a specific type of demand - the “look at X” demand - and parental responses to it. Through these investigations of children’s methods, I demonstrate that young children utilise the developmental scheme as a resource for designing their actions and managing their social positions. This study contributes to a growing body of knowledge on children’s methods for engaging with adults, managing their social positions (through deontic, epistemic and affective claims) and, thus, contributing to their own socialisation; while demonstrating the importance of avoiding a priori assumptions of authority in interactions between parents and children. From: https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/items/9c0b8dec-038b-495c-aee2-ee0dd532b8ce
... In many post-industrial, working-/middle-class households, interaction between parents and children is a constant negotiation between parental control and child autonomy (Demuth, 2013;Sirota, 2006;Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018). Parents and caregivers are often trying to accomplish multiple things in their interactions in the family home. ...
... Parents can complete household activities themselves, but this can limit the opportunities for the development of children's self-organizing and regulation. As such, negotiating children's accomplishment of, and accountability for, routine household activities is common (Sirota, 2006;Aronsson & Cekaite, 2011). ...
... This case showed an activity contract negotiation in the course of bedtime preparation. Sirota (2006) wrote that transitions to bedtime preparation activities are a common site of negotiations and parents of autistic children report bedtime routines are especially difficult (O'Nions et al., 2018;Ooi et al., 2016). It would be worth investigating these routines in families with autistic children with a bigger collection study to establish where the difficulties might lie and explicate parents' practices for resolving them. ...
Article
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Directive trajectories are common in parent–child talk as parents attempt to engage their children in household activities. Previous research on families with autistic children has reported that parents have difficulty engaging their children in household activities. The current study analyses the strategies a parent utilizes in negotiating an activity contract with their autistic child. The analyses show that the parent negotiates stances towards autonomy, category-membership-tied activities and social obligations, as well as used embodied conduct. The analyses also show how the child is sensitive to these strategies and actively participates in the directive trajectory. The findings show that both parent and child are active co-constructors of the social relationship in directive trajectories and that the child can strategically counter the variety of directive resources the parent uses.
... The current project further addresses the complexity of securing child compliance by focusing on a specific parental practice in response to the child's mealtime requests for alternative food or activities. Despite the spotlight on requests in the language and social interaction literature (e.g., Drew and Cooper-Kuhlen, 2014), responses to requests have received relatively less attention beyond their generic features of granting being preferred and rejection dispreferred (Schegloff, 2007). A notable exception is Thompson et al. (2015) seminal volume on building responsive actions, which has offered rich descriptions of responses to information-seeking sequences and request-for-action sequences. ...
... Rather than answering Dad's why-question with a second pair part (Schegloff, 2007), Zoe proceeds to offer a solution to this problem as she regains control of the situation (Waring, 2019), effectively initiating a new sequence with the announcement I'll save some for later (line 10). Just short of bringing that TCU (turn constructional unit) (Sacks et al., 1974) to its completion, however, Zoe cuts it off, pause for a brief (0.2) second, and begins to form an interrogative, as opposed to the earlier declarative statement, with the modal can (line 10). ...
... Third, while later is interpretable as minutes later or indefinitely laterda problem for both Zoe and Dad, bring some to school not only makes later "the next day" for Zoe but also gives Dad some assurance that the spaghetti will indeed be eaten at some point. Finally, unlike the declarative format of I'll do X, the interrogative Can I do X? along with the gaze makes conditionally relevant Dad's granting or rejection, where the former is preferred over the latter (Schegloff, 2007). In short, through this request, Zoe persists in her attempt to avoid eating the spaghetti in question. ...
Article
Forestalling, disputing, and postponing the main activity of eating during mealtimes comprise a routine activity for young children and present a constant challenge for parents. Indeed, securing child compliance during moments of conflict has become a notable theme in the literature on parent-child interaction. Based on a larger corpus of 35 video-recorded family meals that involves a three-year-old child and her parents, this conversation analytic study details one practice—that of conditional granting—utilized by the parents to maneuver the thorny position of responding to the child's requests for alternative food and activities. Findings contribute to the literature on parent-child interactions and that on responses to requests.
... Along the same lines, children also use the I want format to make a request in opposition to parents' imperatives while they use Can I in downgraded requests that display an orientation to the parents' interests (Wootton, 1981b). Older children (aged six to eleven) may also provide accounts to legitimize their non-compliance or employ bargaining maneuvers so that they comply with the directive only partially or on their own terms such as eating less food (Goodwin, 2006) or having more time (Goodwin, 2006;Sirota, 2006). Notably, in negotiated request sequences, participants' forms of participation and affective stances (e.g. ...
... Goodwin, 2006). In line 11, he recycles the can I format but with a mid-turnconstruction-unit pause, audible breath, a sweet voice, and a bargaining maneuver that reduces the scope of the requested action to ''for a while'' (see also Goodwin, 2006;Sirota, 2006). ...
... Rather than responding to Dad's accusation, Jayden pursues the request further (lines 60--62) with a bargain maneuver (Goodwin, 2006;Sirota, 2006). First, he ties his turn back (Goodwin, 2006;Sacks, 1995) to Dad's earlier compromise (playing on the iPad when waiting for lunch), thus legitimizing the bargain. ...
Article
This paper presents a longitudinal study of a four-year-old child's development of the interactional practices to negotiate requests when immediate granting from the parents was not given. While many studies have focused on the development of requesting abilities by children and some have shed light on their request negotiation practices, little is currently known about how children develop the interactional practices to pursue requests in extended discourse. Using conversation analysis to track a child's request negotiation practices for twelve months, we demonstrate that over time, the child learned to occasion, formulate, and reformulate requests in ways that exhibited increased sensitivity to the recipient and the sequential context as well as to his own entitlement and the request's contingency. The findings contribute to research on child language socialization by highlighting the active role children may play in co-constructing interaction and thus shaping the trajectory of socialization.
... Some scholars have explicitly noted child autonomy as a goal of socialization. Sirota (2006) describes how parents and children co-construct bedtime routines that "foster autonomous self-initiative" (2006: 493). In her study on homework completion, Wingard (2006) writes that the "tension between child autonomy and parent control" is a characteristic of parent-child interaction (2006: 574). ...
... As such, findings of this study contribute to the literature on how fostering autonomy may be interactionally achieved (Sirota 2006;Wingard 2006) by presenting evidence for the child's active engagementa relatively underexplored themein this process. In particular, if the goal of socialization is to produce a self-regulating child, Zoe seems to be actively attaining that goal by enacting other-regulation, constructing her parents as needing such guidance as direction, advice, and mediation. ...
Article
Dinner times provide rich opportunities for overt and covert socialization. Drawing upon a larger corpus of 35 video-recorded family meals involving the three-year-old Zoe and her parents, this conversation analytic study describes how Zoe displays such agency through the practice of “voicing control” – momentarily sounding and acting like an adult by performing a range of controlling acts such as leading, instructing, advising, assessing, and mediating. I argue that by playing with such activities bound to the category of a higher position than hers, the child manages to grow “a head taller” in the Vygotskyan sense. The findings contribute to the budding literature on documenting socialization in naturalistic settings with a specific focus on the child’s role in such socialization.
... 314-316) of everyday greetings and farewells allows participants to reveal their perception of their relative social status vis-à-vis one another (Laver, 1981, p. 301). Hugs provide a way of displaying intimacy within various forms of boundary intertwinings that occur during the day -when chil- dren greet their parents in the morning after extensive separation during the night, when children leave for school, when they come home from school or go to bed (Sirota, 2006). As Goffman (1971, p. 63), in his work on interchanges at the boundaries of encounters, has argued, greetings and farewells display involve- ment and connectedness to the other, and the recipient is obligated to show that Constituting relationships of care through boundary intertwinings 143 the message has been received and its import has been appreciated. ...
... Families engage in similar routine intertwinings and bedtime routines, exchanging verbal and haptic tokens of intimacy and affection, although the US families show a richer vocabulary in their reassurances of love ("I love you from all my heart"), vocabulary that in the Swedish context is reserved for roman- tic relationships. Bedtime routines are culturally anchored by being related to the material conditions and child-rearing and sleeping habits of families (Breazeale, 2001;Sirota, 2006). ...
Book
Embodied Family Choreography documents the lived and embodied practices employed to establish, maintain, and negotiate intimate social relationships in the family, examining forms of control, care, and creativity. Making use of extensive video archives of family interaction in the US and Sweden, it presents the first investigation of how touch and interaction, in conjunction with talk, constitute a primary means of orchestrating activities, revealing the important role touch plays in the context of contemporary Western middle class family life and shedding light on the ways in which the visual, aural, and haptic senses (usually analysed separately) mutually elaborate one another.
... This investigation draws on prior work on family-interactions, within the framework of language socialization and discursive psychology, that investigated parenting strategies that foster familial and cultural values such as autonomy, interdependence and responsibility and that draw on different forms of authoritativeness. Negotiating practices and egalitarian strategies were found for instance in middle class families in Los Angeles (Fasulo et al. 2007;Sirota 2006) and Sweden (Aronsson & Cekaite 2011). Similarly, Hepburn & Potter (2011) analyzed the use of threats in British middle class family dinner interactions as a means of co-constructing social influence on children. ...
... As such they constitute politeness strategies. Politeness strategies, as Brown and Levinson (1987; see also Sirota 2006) have pointed out, allow for modification of the direction of interaction without threatening the affective-relational bond between the interlocutors. ...
Article
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Interaction between adults and infants by nature constitutes a strong powerasymmetry relationship. Based on the assumption that communicative practices with infants are inseparably intertwined with broader cultural ideologies of good child care, this paper will contrast how parents in two distinct socio-cultural communities deal with power asymmetry in interactions with 3-months old infants. The study consists of a microanalysis of videotaped free play mother-infant interactions from 20 middle class families in Muenster, Germany and 20 traditional farming Nso families in Kikaikelaki, Cameroon. Analysis followed a discursive psychology approach. The focus of analysis is on how mothers handle and negotiate power-distance in these interactions and what discursive strategies they draw on. Mothers in both groups used various forms of directives and control strategies. The Muenster mothers, however, mainly used mitigated directives that can be seen as strategies to reduce the competence gap between mother and child, while the Nso mothers mainly used upgraded directives to stress the hierarchical discrepancy between mother and child. The different strategies are discussed in light of the prevailing broader cultural ideologies and the normative orientations that they reflect. Finally, the findings are discussed with regard to possible developmental consequences of these distinct cultural practices for the child. Keywords: power-asymmetry; mother-infant interaction; discursive psychology; culture; Nso farmers; Muenster middle class families
... She thus demonstrates her agency by re-formulating the proposed terms of agreement, bargaining for time (cf. Goodwin, 2006;Sirota, 2006). In a second account, Mother spells out the reason why Ida has to take a shower; otherwise, she will smell (lines 5-7), but Ida simply denies that this will be the case. ...
... For instance, an early first mention of a target activity may project subsequent requests in family life, setting a horizon of expectation for parents and children about upcoming events such as homework or bedtime (e.g. Sirota, 2006;Wingard, 2006). Moreover, the present analyses have shown how an initial account of the need for target action may function as a request, threat or warning (depending on its sequential location), providing parents with the possibility to initiate and negotiate a contract and to establish a child's accountability in a temporally distant future (e.g. ...
Article
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In theorizing on family life, children’s agency is a feature of a modern type of family, marked by free choice and inter-generational negotiations rather than parental authority. A video ethnography of Swedish everyday family life documents directive sequences and inter-generational negotiations, including what is here called activity contracts: agreements that form a type of inter-generational account work around target activities (e.g. cleaning one’s room). Within local family politics, contracts and revised contracts emerge as parts of such account work. The analyses focus on how contracts emerge within successive downgradings and upgradings of parental directives. Activity contracts regulate mutual rights and obligations, invoking family rule statements and local moral order, drawing on an array of verbal and nonverbal resources, ranging from parents’ mitigated requests and children’s time bargaining to nonverbal escape strategies and gentle shepherding.
... Discourse analytic research has tackled at least two contexts in which resistance figures prominently: (1) advising (e.g., Heritage and Sefi, 1992;Silverman, 1997;Velvilanen, 2009) and (2) interaction with children (e.g., Hutchby, 2002;Goodwin, 2007;Sirota, 2006). In advising contexts, such resistance is found not only in situations where advice is uninvited (Jefferson & Lee, 1992) but also in settings where advice is actively sought (Waring, 2005). ...
... The analysis shows how the father manages to change a tense encounter into a joyful collaboration on the homework problems. With a focus on children's resistance to bedtime, Sirota (2006) shows that parents often engage in "continued negotiation through mitigation, indirectness, and counter-requests of their own" (p. 509). ...
Article
This study describes how a novice ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) student teacher successfully navigates an instructional path in a one-on-one tutoring session with a second grade student. We document the student teacher's strategies to both engage and disengage her student, who alternately resists and cooperates throughout the lesson. In particular, we demonstrate, through conversation analysis, how the student teacher fine-tunes her moment-by-moment decision-making in order to maintain forward momentum through a series of transitions by negotiating with her student, avoiding power struggles, and incorporating student interests while at the same time keeping her teaching objectives in mind. The findings illuminate the complexities involved in implementing a seemingly mundane task such as transitioning in teaching. The various resources for managing resistance can contribute to detailing teacher education in important ways. We conclude by addressing the methodological advantages of combining conversation analysis and ethnographic insights in examining educational interaction.
... Throughout the data, Matt and mom meaningfully participate in interaction together, accomplishing a range of activities. These activities were often present in the form of various routines, such as mealtime and bedtime routines, that are also present in the family lives of typically-developing children Sirota, 2006). A number of activities also occurred at a specific timeframe in the child's day, constituting daily routines embedded within larger 'communicative projects' (Linell, 1998). ...
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This dissertation surfaces the embodied interactions of non/minimally-speaking autistic individuals as they navigate daily life in a speaking, neurotypical world. Through integrating: (1) reflexive video-based fieldwork; (2) microanalyses of embodied interaction; and (3) the design and development of novel tools for communication, this body of work critiques the pervasive foregrounding of the stream of speech in daily interaction and traditional alternative augmentative communication (AAC) design. The embodied interactions of non-speaking autistic individuals are likened to the cultural practice of improvisation, where multisensory exploration and the creation of new structures is co-achieved by multiple interactants. This dissertation bears implications for the design of therapeutic interventions for the communicative wellbeing of non-speaking autistic individuals. Non-speaking autistic individuals have spent too long accommodating to us. It is time we—speaking interlocutors—began listening to them.
... In all, we witnessed not only how the next generation of Russian speakers living abroad is socialized in situ to interact with written text ( Heath, 1982 ;Poveda, 2003 ) in their heritage language, but also the endeavors of multilingual middle-class parents to carry out pedagogical agendas. The ways in which DIUs are used by the mothers and children in this study, exemplified cultural ambiguity of contemporary pedagogy ( Koshik, 2005 ) and family life ( Ochs & Kremer-Sadlik, 2015a ;2015b ;Sirota, 2006 ) applied to aspirations of raising bilingual and biliterate children. The literacy event is a ritualized collaborative activity that creates an environment for learning, entertainment, and bonding. ...
Article
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This video-ethnographic study investigates how designedly incomplete utterances (DIUs) are used during home literacy events in three multilingual families with young children in Sweden to prompt collaborative storybook reading in the children's heritage language, Russian. The multimodal interaction analyses uncover how DIUs, in concert with other semiotic resources, create a sequential environment to prompt children's speech production in relation to the text at hand, negotiate language choice and alignment with an ongoing literacy project, and to creatively exploit the DIU structure to initiate storytelling. The findings moreover show that recurrent use of DIUs during the reading of well-known to the child texts with rhythm and rhyme allows for ritualized engagement in co-narration, in all contributing to children's socialization to oral performance in the heritage language.
... Shared leisure activities, daily chores and unstructured mundane interaction are central for how everyday family life is organized, and such activities provide multiple socialization opportunities for children and parents. Apparently, language learning and learning to use languages are accomplished through various forms of family talk and socializing practices or routinized activities such as cleaning practices (Fasulo, Loyd & Padiglione, 2007), bedtime rituals (Sirota, 2006), or homework routines (Wingard & Forsberg, 2007). Family mealtime has been studied greatly across cultures and acknowledged as a fruitful site for exploring language socialization and intergenerational talk (Aronsson & Gottzén, 2011;Blum-Kulka, 1997Ochs, Pontecorvo & Fasulo, 1996;Pauletto, Aronsson & Galiano, 2017;Sterponi 2009). ...
Thesis
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Situated within research on language socialization and family language policy, this thesis explores how young children (2–4 years old) learn their heritage language in multilingual, transnational families, and how multilingualism becomes an integral part of family life. It draws on video-ethnographic fieldwork in three bi/multilingual families in Sweden with preschool-aged children where the mothers speak Russian and the parents aspire to raise children multilingually. Using a multimodal interactional analysis, the three studies identify and examine recurrent language practices that promote the children’s use of the heritage language, Russian, in mother-child interactions. They approach heritage language maintenance as embedded in mundane activities such as home language lessons during collaboratively accomplished chores (Study I), conversational storytelling during mealtime (Study II), and co-narration during literacy events (Study III). The analyses focus on the interactional organization of language learning agendas and heritage language socialization environments that are initiated by the mothers to scaffold their children’s learning and use of Russian. In particular, this study illuminates various ways to engage the children in collaborative Russian speech production, including mutually enjoyable embodied performances. Moreover, it is shown in detail how high expectations of children as heritage language speakers and learners and educational efforts are interactionally balanced through relational work. The findings suggest that the realization of family language policy to support heritage language development relies not only on consistent language choice, frequency of language use, and parental strategies and ideologies, but also on how language choice and language use are embedded in the ongoing activity, how activity formats are organized and appropriated by the children, the position of the child as a speaker vis-à-vis the parent, and affective alignments. The study uncovers an interplay of educational, relational, ideological, and pragmatic dimensions of heritage language socialization in the home. In this way, the thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of family language policy and children’s emergent multilingualism as integrated in everyday family life.
... Throughout the data, Matt and mom meaningfully participate in interaction together, accomplishing a range of activities. These activities were often present in the form of various routines, such as mealtime and bedtime routines, that are also present in the family lives of typically-developing children (Goodwin and Cekaite 2018;Sirota 2006). A number of activities also occurred at a specific timeframe in the child's day, constituting daily routines embedded within larger 'communicative projects' (Linell 1998). ...
Article
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The human capacity for intersubjective engagement is present, even when one is limited in speaking, pointing, and coordinating gaze. This paper examines the everyday social interactions of two differently-disposed actors—a non-speaking autistic child and his speaking, neurotypical mother—who participate in shared attention through dialogic turn-taking. In the collaborative pursuit of activities, the participants coordinate across multiple turns, producing multi-turn constructions that accomplish specific goals. The paper asks two questions about these collaborative constructions: 1) What are their linguistic and discursive structures? 2) How do embodied actions contribute to these constructions? Findings show that the parent and child repeatedly co-produced multi-turn constructions that had consistent structures, implying a sophisticated ability to anticipate the completion of action trajectories. Examining the embodied actions of interactants revealed that the child often accommodated to the parent’s demands for participation. Nonetheless, the child occasionally pursued his own goals by improvising with and within multi-turn constructions. He launched constructions to redirect parental attention, and otherwise produced surprising actions within the turn-taking structure of these constructions. The paper concludes that multi-turn constructions in the midst of activities are a primordial site in which to begin observing the competencies of non-speaking autistic children for intersubjective engagement.
... Ochs e Izquierdo (2009) y Klein, Izquierdo y Graesch (2008) muestran que un alto grado de directivos en la familia de clase media norteamericana de CELF son resistidos, negociados o ignorados por los niños y reciclados por sus padres con diferentes estrategias discursivas para lograr el cumplimiento de estos 5 . Los esfuerzos de los padres por lograr la atención de los niños y la negociación y resistencia de estos se han reportado en actividades de higiene personal (cepillado de dientes) (Fasulo, Lloyd y Padiglioni 2007; Tulbert y Goodwin, en prensa) 6 , en rutinas para ir a la cama (Sirota 2006), a la hora de la comida (Paugh e Izquierdo 2009) así como en la realización de tareas escolares (Forberg y Wingard 2006, C. Goodwin 2006a, Liberati 2005. Para otras actividades se reporta variedad en el uso de directivos dependiendo de la actividad y hora del día. ...
Chapter
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el presente capítulo analiza las prácticas comunicativas que dirigen y organizan la atención de los niños en el trabajo doméstico en familias mayas zinacantecas de Chiapas, México. En esta comunidad se toma por supuesto que los niños participan en las diversas tareas domésticas, por lo que normalmente no reciben instrucciones para marcar e iniciar la actividad, para negociar si se hace o no, sino, en ciertos casos específicos, para monitorearla y precisarla cuando no son totalmente competentes en esta.Para examinar este punto me interesa enfocarme en los directivos, formas discursivas diseñadas para lograr que alguien realice una acción (Goodwin 1990: 64, 2006a; Ervin-Tripp, 1976, 1982; Ervin-Tripp y otros 1984: 116). Al examinar las secuencias de directivos y las estrategias interactivas en su diseño y negociación entre adultos y niños descubrimos un área de gran interés en la socialización a la participación y la organización de la atención y el aprendizaje. Observo que los directivos se usan para «afinar» o «calibrar» la atención por medio de: (i) formulaciones «didácticas» cuya función es el adiestramiento en la tarea, así como por (ii) una apelación a una ética del trabajo y la responsabilidad. Esta función de los directivos resulta del supuesto de que el niño/niña está realizando un trabajo activo de atención, y su participación en la actividad no es cuestionada ni negociada sino presupuesta por todos los participantes. El trabajo se enmarca en la participación y la agencia de los niños/as indígenas en actividades de pertinencia cultural.
... Hugs are forms of haptic exchange that occur in association with greetings and farewells. Both are important forms of affective displays that convey regard for another person at crucial junctures in the day, upon reunion (Campos et al. 2009;Goodwin 2015;Ochs and Campos 2013) or separation (Sirota 2006). While greetings in face-to-face encounters look forward to a period of increased access (waking up, coming home from school), rituals of farewell mark decreased access (saying goodbye in the morning as the child leaves for school or is dropped off at school, or goodnight at the end of the day). ...
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This chapter extends the sequential analysis of human action to encompass intimate co-operative action, accomplished through the haptic, temporally unfolding intertwining of multiple bodies. The focus is on the construction through public social practice of tactile intercorporeality. Within a basic social institution, the family, members make use of culturally appropriate tactile communication (including the hug, the kiss, and other intertwinings of the body) during moments of affectively rich supportive interchanges. Materials for the study are drawn from video recordings of naturally occurring social interaction in thirty-two Los Angeles families who were part of the UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families. Examination of forms of experiential embodiment is important for articulating the participation frameworks through which affectively rich intimate social relationships are established, maintained, and negotiated.
... Blum-Kulka 1997;C. Goodwin 2007;Sirota 2006;Wingard 2006). As in many familial interactions, disputes and emotions too are played out interactionally, in this case within the car's inner spaces and within the context of automobility (Katz 1999;Noy 2009;Sheller 2004). ...
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Inspired by recent advances in the field of automobility, this article explores how families inhabit cars, and how daily automobilized family routines are accomplished interactionally in and through cars' uniquely structured inner space(s). Following Urry's (2006) notion of the "socially inhabited car," the article assumes sociological and ethnomethodological sensibilities and sensitivities in researching in-car interactions. Specifically, a single strip of a familial dispute that takes place in the car on a routine trip to school is studied. The audiovisual data was taken from recordings of five urban families living in Jerusalem, Israel, during daily trips to school. A camcorder was supplied to the passengers - children of elementary school age - which served as a mobile recording device that captured the car's interior spaces and the interactions therein. Studying up-close verbal and gestural interactions reveals how family members, including driver (in the front seat) and passengers (in both the front and back seats), make use of the unique material design of the car's inner spaces as semiotic resources for communication and for affiliating and disaffiliating with the overall argumentative interaction. The article illuminates how an immediate physical context, in the shape of the car's interior, acts simultaneously as a material given and as a socially emergent or accomplished semiotic environment.
... Their findings revealed differences in the style and amount of parental control over cleaning tasks, and the number of options given to children in the process and sequence of tasks, which may lead to the construction or limitation of children's agency. Sirota (2006) could show how mother-child bedtime routines in US middle-class families serve as an interactional matrix to foster autonomous self-initiative in tandem with a growing capacity for relational communion with others. ...
Chapter
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Communication with children plays a crucial role not only for cognitive and social-emotional development but also in a more general sense for an understanding of self and self in relation to others. Research from linguistic anthropology and cultural developmental psychology have shown that there exists a great variety of cultural genres of communicating with children that are in line with the relevant broader cultural ideologies of good child care. Culture, communication, and self-development are inextricably intertwined. Culturally distinct communicative practices in which children participate will therefore ultimately lead to different cultural developmental pathways. While traditional research in developmental psychology has focused on mother–child dyads and experimental designs there is an increasing recognition of the need for naturalistic studies of everyday communication with children including their broader social network.
... Routines are defined in this study as a series of predictable actions that are performed at similar times each day (Boyce, Jensen, James, & Peacock, 1983). Family routines can also be viewed as situated, emergent, and jointly constructed between parents and children (Sirota, 2006;Spagnola & Feise, 2007), with cultural values and ecological variables influencing the construction of routines (Weisner, Matheson, Coots, & Bernheimer, 2005). Family routines have been shown to support language, academic, and social skills development and contribute to family identity, cohesion, and health and well-being Denham, 2003;Feise, 2007;Spagnola & Feise, 2007). ...
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Background. Research has consistently shown that families with children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty engaging in family routines, yet little is known about families with adolescents with ASD.
... Likewise, a number of studies could demonstrate how children are socialized into cultural understanding of norms and transgressions (Pontecorvo et al., 2001;Sterponi, 2009), family time (Kremer-Sadlik et al., 2008), a culturally appropriate sense of self and identity (Forrester, 2002;Miller et al., 1997), taste preferences (Ochs et al., 1996) and autonomy and relatedness (Fasulo et al., 2007, Sirota, 2006, based on parents' discursive practices with their children. ...
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In reply to Cresswell’s article, I will comment on his suggestion to broaden discursive psychology studies on refugees, race and ethnicity by (a) an ethnomethodological perspective including broader social discourses and (b) a phenomenological perspective including immediate experience. I will argue how such a dialogical approach is crucial for the understanding of human psychological functioning and can also be fruitfully applied to other areas of psychology such as early child development.
... This is a strategy used in adult-adult exchanges for politeness and extended here in a context intended to alter the child's behaviour (Brown and Levinson, 1987). This move also softens the tone of the mother's request and appeals to imagined reason of the child (Sirota, 2006). It is interesting, in this context, that the mother continues by referring to her own personal feeling and opinion as justification for the restriction against crying (line 242). ...
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Child rearing is a universal task, yet there are differing solutions according to the dynamics of socio-cultural milieu in which children are raised. Cultural models of what is considered good or bad parenting become explicit in everyday routine practices. Focusing on early mother–infant interactions in this article we examine the discursive practices and strategies that foster cultural values such as autonomy and relatedness. Drawing on micro-analysis of videotaped mother–infant interactions from middle-class families in Muenster, Germany and farming Nso families in Kikaikelaki, Cameroon, we aim at illustrating how diverse discursive strategies construct alternative versions of the child’s experience of self and self-in-relation-to-others. In each case, mothers draw on discursive practices that convey cultural norms and values that fit the relevant cultural context.
... & Levinson, 1987;Sirota, 2006). Reference is made to the needs and personal preferences of the mother, conveying the message that mutual interests need to be respected. ...
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This article addresses the socialization of emotion expression in infancy. It argues that in order to adequately understand emotion development we need to consider the appraisal of emotion expression through caregivers in mundane, everyday interactions. Drawing on sociocultural and Bakhtinian theorizing, it claims that caregivers' appraisals of infants' emotion expression are dialogically intertwined with broader speech genres or “communicative genres” of a community and the emotional-volitional tone and normative orientations embedded in them. It aims to investigate how communicative genres become visible in early caregiver–infant interactions. In a comparative study with 20 farming Cameroonian Nso mothers from Kikaikelaki and 20 German middle-class mothers from Muenster and their 3-month-old infants, we investigated discursive practices used by the mothers in reaction to the infants' expression of negative affect. We found distinct patterns of coconstructing the interaction that point to different normative orientations and communicative genres that can be considered to be specific to the two sociocultural contexts. These communicative genres were found to be in line with broader cultural ethnotheories on good child care in these two communities found in previous studies and by other researchers.
... Through participation in everyday routines and social interactions as both active participants and observers, children are socialized into culturally specific orientations toward work, education, time, morality, responsibility, individualism, success, well-being, and what it means to be a family (e.g. studies on American working families: Ochs and Taylor, 1995;Paugh, 2005;Goodwin, 2006;Sirota, 2006;Wingard, 2006Wingard, , 2007Fasulo et al., 2007;Kremer-Sadlik and Kim 2007). Moreover, storytelling with family members socializes children to intellectual skills that are valued in mainstream American educational settings, such as critical thinking, perspective-taking, and metacognition (Heath, 1983;. ...
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American popular and academic discourses suggest that 'quality time'--conceived as unstressed, uninterrupted special time with children--is important for family well-being. However, such discourses often engender stress and guilt among working parents, who have difficulty finding time for 'quality time'. This article explores the concept of 'quality time' in academic and popular literature (such as websites) and then draws on interviews and ethnographic video recordings of 32 dual-earner, two-parent American families to explore both perceived and lived experiences of family time. It proposes that everyday activities (like household chores or running errands) may afford families quality moments, unplanned, unstructured instances of social interaction that serve the important relationship-building functions that parents seek from 'quality time'. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... But there is a growing body of evidence of intergenerational negotiations. For instance, contemporary middle-class parents and children in Sweden, Italy, Israel, and the US negotiate cleaning practices (Fasulo, Loyd, & Padiglione 2007;Aronsson & Cekaite 2011), bedtime procedures (Sirota 2006;Aronsson & Cekaite 2011), homework (Forsberg 2007;Wingard & Forsberg 2009), computer gaming time (Aarsand & Aronsson 2009), and dinner protocol (Ochs et al. 1996;Blum-Kulka 1997;de Geer 2004). However, negotiations do not necessarily guarantee "democratic" participation. ...
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This article concerns generation and food morality, drawing on video recordings of dinners in Swedish middle-class families. A detailed analysis of affect displays during one family dinner extends prior work on food morality (Ochs, Pontecorvo, & Fasulo 1996; Grieshaber 1997; Bourdieu 2003; Wiggins 2004), documenting ways in which participants may shift between distinct generational positions with respect to affects and food morality (from “irresponsible child” to caretaker positions). In our recordings, an elder sibling is shifting between a series of contrasting affective stances (Ochs & Schieffelin 1989; M. Goodwin 2006; Stivers 2008), linked to generational positions along an implicit age continuum: positioning himself, at one end of the continuum, as his young brother's accomplice, and at the other as an adult, a serious guardian of food morality. This study shows that generational positions are not fixed, but are positions adopted as parts of language socialization and interactional events. (Generational positions, caretaker positions, social age, affective stances, alignments, negotiations, food morality, language socialization, family life, dinnertime)
... Another limitation emerged from the scan sampling method, which does not mark emotional behaviors or guarantee that individuals remained in the same location or engaged in the same activity in the 10 min between observation rounds (Broege et al., 2007; Ochs et al., 2006). Finally, our focus on spontaneous moments and opportunities for interaction precluded examination of more scripted family routines like dinner or bedtime (see Ochs et al., in press, and Sirota, 2006 for treatment of these two practices within this dataset). We are mindful that these limitations restrict the generalizability of our findings but hasten to note that the rich behavioral data yielded by this work brings attention to aspects of dual-earner family life that might otherwise not be studied. ...
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Everyday patterns of interaction can strengthen or undermine bonds between family members. This naturalistic observation study focused on an understudied facet of family life: opportunities for interaction among dual-earner family members after work and family members' responses to these opportunities. Thirty dual-earner couples and their children were observed and video-recorded in their homes throughout two weekday afternoons and evenings. Two interaction opportunities were analyzed: (1) the behavior of family members toward a parent returning home from work and (2) the physical proximity of family members throughout the evening. Three main findings emerged. Women, who tended to return home before men, were greeted with positive behavior and reports of the day's information from family members. Men, in contrast, returned home later in the day and received positive behavior or no acknowledgment from family members distracted by other activities. Throughout the evening, mothers spent more time with children whereas fathers spent more time alone. Couples were seldom together without their children. The implications of observed interaction patterns and the contribution of naturalistic observation methods to the study of family relationships are discussed.
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The importance of presenting a united front has long since been an integral part of parenting advice. Despite the wealth of productive research on parent-child interaction, we have very little knowledge of how such a united front is assembled in situ, In the meantime, although few would question the benefit of collaboration, we are still in the process of understanding how collaboration is carried out in the micro-moments of interaction. This article contributes to the growing literature on parent-child interaction as well as that on collaboration in interaction by detailing how two parents achieve collaboration through merged speakership and merged recipiency. Findings may be applicable to a wide range of workspaces beyond the domestic sphere. (Family interaction, conversation analysis, collaboration)*
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Up to 25 per cent of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder are classified as ‘nonverbal’. Building on interactional research on the communicative skills of Autistic children and of individuals who do not use speech, this article uses video data to examine the interactional competence of an Autistic bilingual Latino teenager who does not use speech to communicate. A comparison of multiple instances of the teenager’s getting-dressed routine shows that contrary to the clinical framing of this routine as individualized and efficiency-oriented, getting dressed can be a social achievement that relies on the collaboration of multiple social actors in community settings. While a core feature of an Autism diagnosis is social and communicative impairment, the analysis demonstrates that Autistic interaction is highly social and richly communicative as well as affectively engaged.
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This chapter explores how interactions occur in the outdoors between parents and children, and the consequences for our understanding of encountering and negotiating unfamiliarity. Specifically, it draws on empirical data from video recordings of a family, with two young children, following a heritage app guide of a Roman Fort in the Brecon Beacons National Park. Our focus is on the family’s interactions, which manage the negotiation of unfamiliarity, particularly how adults draw on their own familiarity to introduce children to heritage features, as well as navigate the family visit across difficult terrain. Within these negotiations, feature the device and digital heritage app, an increasingly ubiquitous and familiar facet of family interactions, and here the chapter focuses on the skill displayed by both children and their parents of managing the place of the mobile device, and app instructions, in ‘unfamiliar’ terrain. This chapter therefore explores the intersubjective work that occurs between children and their parents to jointly negotiate unfamiliar heritage, landscapes and technology, to explore how the familiarity of ‘family’ gets done in unfamiliar terrain.
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The importance of emotional competence and the pivotal role parents play in the development of such competence have been a topic of great interest for developmental psychologists and linguistic anthropologists alike. While existing research on emotional socialization primarily focuses on negative emotions using mostly experimental or ethnographic methods, positive emotions remain an under-explored territory, and conversation analysis an under-utilized micro-analytic tool. This chapter investigates how the socialization of joy and surprise is accomplished in a repeated series of playful gift giving and receiving during video-recorded mealtime parent-child interactions in a U.S. family with a three-year-old girl and her parents. Findings contribute to the broader literature on parent-child interaction with a specific focus on the socialization of emotions.
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This paper analyzes the impact of adults' interactive moves and strategies on children's participation and agency at dinnertime in two Italian residential care facilities, one of the most widely used alternative care life-context for children and youth coming from vulnerable families. Participants are 14 children and 11 educators living in two residential care facilities in Rome (Italy). Adopting an interactional and multimodal analytic approach, this paper focuses on two dinnertime activities: the routine activity of praying before eating and the very frequent one of talking about rules and transgressions. The comparative analysis of the two facilities shows how, in stable patterns of adult-child interactions recurring across different activities in the same facility, adults' strategies and interactive maneuvers differently impact on children's participation and agency and consequent socialization practices. In the conclusion, we emphasize the relevance and implications of this study for either research in educational sciences and for professionals operating in alternative care and related fields.
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This paper examines heritage language practices embedded in mundane family activities in a context of Russian-Swedish mother-child interaction. The analysis focuses on the organization and accomplishments of a variety of so-called home language lessons, here termed language workout. In mobilizing a teacher-talk register (e.g., corrections, questions with known answers, hyper-articulation), this practice resembles common language socialization practices in middle-class families. Its sequential organization (e.g. talk turns are coordinated with task turns; repetitions and expansion of the target linguistic item in the following turn) and consistent employment of a parent-talk register (e.g. diminutives) dialectically invoke educational and intimate, task- and language-oriented dimensions. The findings reveal that the realization of language policy in bilingual families relies not only on parental input and language choice, but also on the position of the child as a speaker and learner vis-à-vis the parent and ways in which the child is invited to put the target language into use. While family language policy research primarily uncovered how children challenge family language norms, this study highlights a format that allows for educational, affective and engaging exploration of bilingual language use with young children at home.
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This chapter provides an overview of Gestalt theory and its relevance to psychological anthropology. Drawing on Gestalt principles, the chapter introduces the concept of configurational learning. It argues that this learning facilitates children’s sense-making capacities as they are mentored into culturally resonant ways of attending to, and aligning, dimensions of experience in conjunction with one another. On this view, children actively assemble culturally salient information into an intelligible, culturally patterned “whole.” The chapter provides a comparative analysis of such learning by examining children’s sleep practices in two diverse cultural settings: the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire and middle-class families in Los Angeles, California. It proposes that configurational learning depends, first, on the cultural shaping of attentional processes. Concurrently, intersubjective attunement facilitates this learning as caregiver and child orchestrate a consensually shared frame of reference that sets a feeling tone and moral valence for apperception, understanding, and action. The chapter asserts that psychocultural Gestalt processes of configurational learning are pivotal in composing culturally emergent selves and sensibilities, and, thus, are central for understanding how cultural practices operate from the ground up. The chapter concludes with a discussion about the utility of Gestalt theory to contemporary psychological anthropology and allied fields.
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In recent decades, there has been a rise in dual-career families as women have increasingly entered the paid workforce in the USA, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. Accompanying these trends is a growing body of cross-disciplinary research that examines the relations between work and family, or what are commonly called “working families.” Though broad enough to describe any family in which one or more adults work, this term has been used to refer to dual-earner or employed single-parent families with children, in contrast to families where only one of two cohabiting parents is the wage earner. Much of this literature has analyzed survey data and self-reports, such as questionnaires and interviews. It is in this context that the language socialization paradigm has offered new ways of analyzing working families through careful attention to their everyday social interaction across settings within and outside the home. This research takes a distinctly ethnographic approach, revealing what working families do during their daily lives and illuminating how language socialization occurs through family activities, routines, and talk. This chapter reviews language socialization research that focuses on the work and family interface, including how postindustrial families grapple with cultural ideologies and pressures as they seek to balance work and family demands, and negotiate their children’s autonomy and dependence.
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In recent decades, there has been a rise in dual-career families as women have increasingly entered the paid workforce in the USA, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. Accompanying these trends is a growing body of cross-disciplinary research that examines the relations between work and family, or what are commonly called “working families.” Though broad enough to describe any family in which one or more adults work, this term has been used to refer to dual-earner or employed single-parent families with children, in contrast to families where only one of two cohabiting parents is the wage earner. Much of this literature has analyzed survey data and self-reports, such as questionnaires and interviews. It is in this context that the language socialization paradigm has offered new ways of analyzing working families through careful attention to their everyday social interaction across settings within and outside the home. This research takes a distinctly ethnographic approach, revealing what working families do during their daily lives and illuminating how language socialization occurs through family activities, routines, and talk. This chapter reviews language socialization research that focuses on the work and family interface, including how postindustrial families grapple with cultural ideologies and pressures as they seek to balance work and family demands, and negotiate their children’s autonomy and dependence.
Chapter
In recent decades, there has been a rise in dual-career families as women have increasingly entered the paid workforce in the USA, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. Accompanying these trends is a growing body of cross-disciplinary research that examines the relations between work and family, or what are commonly called “working families.” Though broad enough to describe any family in which one or more adults work, this term has been used to refer to dual-earner or employed single-parent families with children, in contrast to families where only one of two cohabiting parents is the wage earner. Much of this literature has analyzed survey data and self-reports, such as questionnaires and interviews. It is in this context that the language socialization paradigm has offered new ways of analyzing working families through careful attention to their everyday social interaction across settings within and outside the home. This research takes a distinctly ethnographic approach, revealing what working families do during their daily lives and illuminating how language socialization occurs through family activities, routines, and talk. This chapter reviews language socialization research that focuses on the work and family interface, including how postindustrial families grapple with cultural ideologies and pressures as they seek to balance work and family demands, and negotiate their children’s autonomy and dependence.
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This book explores the dynamics in children's everyday lives as they move between school and the family, with particular consideration of how children's motives change in response new challenges. Professors Mariane Hedegaard and Marilyn Fleer follow four children, two from Australia and two from Denmark, over a twelve-month period. Using these case studies, they show how children's everyday activities, play, and the demands of both family and educational contexts influence their learning and development. The authors contribute to a sociocultural theory formulation that includes the child's perspective in cultural historical contexts. Their approach yields insights that transcend specific nationalities, cultures, and socioeconomic situations. The analysis shows not just how children's family life shapes their experiences in school, but how schools influence and shape their lives at home.
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This book integrates theories of intertextuality and framing in order to explore the role of repetition in everyday family interaction. Specifically, it investigates how and why family members repeat words, phrases, paralinguistic features, and speech acts previously produced in conversation by other family members. The book presents a case-study analysis of the discourse of three dual-income American families who recorded their own conversations over the course of one week; this unique data set enables analysis of repetition both within and across family conversations. Using the perspective of interactional sociolinguistics and drawing on theories from linguistics, communication, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, the book's chapters collectively demonstrate how repetition serves as a crucial means of creating the complex, shared meanings that give each family its distinctive identity. The book thus uncovers how repetition in everyday talk serves as a resource for creating a family's private language or familylect, for constructing families as small-group cultures, and for layering and negotiating meanings. In so doing, it puts forth the argument that intertextuality and framing, two powerful notions that have been applied widely (and largely independently) across disciplines, are best understood as fundamentally interconnected. The book also engages with intertextuality as both a theory and a methodological approach.
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A unique and creative textbook that introduces the 'discursive turn' to a new generation of students, Social Psychology and Discourse summarizes and evaluates the current state-of-the-art in social psychology. Using the explanatory framework found in typical texts, it provides unparallel coverage on Discourse Analytic Psychology in a format that is immediately familiar to undergraduate readers. A timely overview of the breadth and depth of discourse research, ideal for undergraduates and also a great resource for postgraduate research students embarking on a discursive project No other text offers the same range of coverage - from the core topics of social cognition, attitudes, prejudice and relationships to lesser known areas such as small group phenomena Includes a host of student-friendly features such as chapter outlines, key terms, a glossary, activity questions, classic studies and further reading.
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Zusammenfassung Ausgehend von neueren Entwicklungen in der diskursiven Psychologie, die sich an den Arbeiten Bachtin's orientieren wird das dialogische Selbst in diesem Beitrag auf die Erforschung frühkindlicher Entwicklung angewendet. Anhand einer vergleichenden Studie von Mutter-Säugling Interaktionen in Mittelschichtsfamilien in Norddeutschland und in kamerunischen Nso Bauernfamilien soll aufgezeigt werden welche Potential ein dialogisches Verständnis von Sprache und Selbst für die Entwicklungspsychologie darstellt und welche empirischen Zugänge hierzu diskursanalytische Verfahren bieten. Summary The potential of a dialogical understanding of language for empirical research in developmental psychology Based on recent developments within the field of discursive psychology that integrate the works of Bakhtin, the present paper discusses the dialogical self with regard to early infancy research. It draws on examples from a comparative study of mother-infant interactions among North German middle class families and Cameroonian Nso to illustrate the potential of a dialogical approach to language and self for developmental psychology and to demonstrate empirical ways of studying child development from this perspective.
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In 2003, a new reality TV genre appeared on British public television built on the spectacle of the parenting of so-called disturbed or problem children. This paper focuses on The House of Tiny Tearaways, a programme in which three families are invited to reside in a specially designed house together with a resident clinical psychologist. Such a programme allows us to explore a range of issues, including (a) how a family assembles itself spatially and coordinates its activities across the lived architectures of the home; and (b) how a child is disciplined in and through the embodied activities, spatial formations and talk of the parents. The paper draws upon mediated discourse analysis and conversation analysis – inflected by contemporary understandings of discipline, space and place – in order to analyse the phenomenon of the ‘time-out’, a generalised ‘technique’ of parentcraft that is used to discipline young children who are misbehaving. Rather than debate the merits of the ‘time-out’ as an appropriate disciplinary instrument, this paper explores the local, emergent and negotiated accomplishment of disciplinary practices of temporal and spatial restraint that involve embodied (inter)action, furniture, objects, and the lived architecture of the domestic sphere.
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The House of Tiny Tearaways (HTT) first appeared on British television in May 2005. Over a six-day period, three families are invited to reside in a specially designed house together with a resident clinical psychologist. The house is to be “a home away from home” for the resident families. The analysis presented in this article focuses on the mediation of domestic spaces and familial technologies and the work of governmentalizing parenting (i.e. the conduct of parental conduct) through discursive and spatial practices. The article draws upon mediated discourse analysis and conversation analysis in order to analyze excerpts from the program and to explore how the affordances and constraints of the specially designed house—its architecture and spatial configuration, as well as the surveillance technology embedded within its walls—are assembled within particular familial activities, and how the relationships between family members are reshaped as a result. The analysis focuses on several key phenomena: 1) practices of video observation in relation to the domestic sphere; 2) use of inscription devices, such as video displays, to capture and visualize behavior and action in the “home;” 3) practicing “techniques” of parentcraft in place; and 4) doing “becoming” the proper object of family therapy or counseling in a simulated “home” laboratory. I conclude that the HTT house is a domesticated laboratory, both for (re)producing problem behaviors and communicative troubles, and for affording participants opportunities to mediate action in new ways.
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IntroductionLocal TheoriesTheories of Child - Rearing and Language Shift in Dominica, West IndiesConclusion References
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Making use of videotapes of family interaction, this paper investigates al-ternative trajectories that develop as parents and children negotiate disputes resulting from directive/response sequences. Forms of arguments consti-tuted through recycled positions are distinguished from arguments that are buttressed by accounts or rule statements. Constellations of features includ-ing structures of control, forms of tying utterances to prior utterances, ac-counts, as well as facing formations are consequential. The forms of partic-ipation frameworks that are constructed a¤ord di¤erent ways of sustaining focused interaction, gearing into what someone has said, and displaying to each other how participants are aligned within the activity frame. Alterna-tive trajectories develop in light of the forms of joint attention that are es-tablished, as well as sustained engagement.
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Abstract Drawing on videotaped family interactional data, I consider Martha Wolfenstein's psychoanalytically informed conception of “fun morality” in the context of contemporary U.S. maternal–child relations. I highlight how U.S. middle-class mothers and children craft imaginative interludes that cultivate valued aspects of personhood and relationality. Cooperative, prosocial behaviors are modeled and elicited alongside individualized self-expression to constitute coexisting values in U.S. middle-class life. Analysis contributes to discussion of situated engagement in moral life by delineating how mothers take up preferred cultural models of mothering as they simultaneously mentor children's moral experiences, behaviors, and worldviews amid circumstances of daily life. [mothering, morality, children, play, family, United States]
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This article analyzes interactions about food and eating among dual-earner middle-class families in Los Angeles, California. It synthesizes approaches from linguistic and medical anthropology to investigate how health is defined and negotiated both in interviews and in everyday communication. In particular, it explores dinnertime episodes from five families to illustrate how interactional bargaining contributes to struggles between parents and children over health-related practices, values, and morality. It compares naturally occurring videotaped interactions to parents' evaluations of their families' health elicited in interviews. The analysis of food interactions reveals much about the discursive construction of health and family life, including frequent conflicts between parents and children over eating practices. [health, food and eating, dinnertime interaction, children, working families, United States]
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Im Fokus des Interesses dieser Arbeit steht die Organisation der Partizipation an informellen und familiären Alltagsgesprächen unter 'aphasischen' Bedingungen. Miteinander ins Gespräch kommen und miteinander im Gespräch bleiben ist konstitutiv für unsere Kultur und unabdingbar für die meisten sozialen Institutionen unserer Gesellschaft, für Parlamente und Arbeitsteams ebenso wie für Familien und Paare. Die Partizipation an Gesprächen ist für uns eine Selbstverständlichkeit. Eine Aphasie ändert dies schlagartig. Sie bewirkt eine Beeinträchtigung des kognitiven Subsystems Sprache und führt dazu, dass es den Betroffenen nicht mehr gelingt, die zu einem gegebenen Zeitpunkt notwendigen Wörter zu äußern, syntaktische Strukturen zu vollenden oder die sprachlichen Äußerungen ihrer Gesprächspartner zu verstehen. Alltägliche Aktivitäten wie Tischgespräche, Klatsch und Tratsch, Absprachen, Diskussionen usw. verlieren ihre Selbstverständlichkeit. Als Kommunikationshindernis und als Stigma prägt die Aphasie die Partizipation der Betroffenen am privaten und öffentlichen sozialen Leben. Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit den Auswirkungen der aphasischen Sprachstörung auf den familiären Kommunikationsalltag. Im Fokus stehen die sprachlich-interaktiven Verfahren der Adaptation, die die Betroffenen in ihren alltäglichen Gesprächen einsetzen und entwickeln, um eine Partizipation der aphasischen Gesprächsteilnehmer trotz der Aphasie zu ermöglichen. Die Untersuchung zielt darauf ab, diese Verfahren zu beschreiben. Sprachlich-interaktive Adaptation wird als gemeinsame Leistung aller Beteiligten analysiert. Als Datengrundlage dienen authentische Gespräche, die von den Betroffenen in ihrem häuslichen Kontext aufgenommen und dem von der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft geförderten Projekt "Adaptationsstrategien in der familiären Kommunikation zwischen Aphasikern und ihren Partnerinnen" (Prof. Dr. Peter Auer, Deutsches Seminar 1 Universität Freiburg 2000-2004)zur Verfügung gestellt wurden. Sie konzentriert sich auf die Aufnahmen zweier Familien, die mit sehr schweren Aphasien zu Recht kommen müssen. Gearbeitet wird mit den Konzepten und Methoden aus verschiedenen interaktionsanalytischen Forschungsrichtungen, aus Goffmans Soziologie des Gesprächs, aus der ethnomethodologischen Konversationsanalyse und aus der interaktionalen Linguistik. Ergebnisse: Die Untersuchung kann zeigen, dass das Aphasiemanagement im familiären Gespräch auf die Aufrechterhaltung der Interaktion und auf die Partizipation der aphasischen Partner ausgerichtet ist (spezifische adaptiertes Partizipationsmanagement). Sie beruht auf der prinzipiellen Kooperativität von Gesprächen. Sie macht von Partizipationsstrukturen wie assistiertem Erzählen, Duetten etc. Gebrauch, die durch eine spezifische Form der Kooperativität - die Kollaborativität - gekennzeichnet sind, und die wir auch aus Gesprächen Sprachgesunder kennen. Diese Partizipationsstrukturen werden in der aphasischen Interaktion an deren spezifische Bedingungen und Ziele adaptiert und mit multimodalen Praktiken des Partizipationsmanagements etabliert, um gemeinsames sprachliches Handeln zu ermöglichen. Darüber hinaus orientieren sich die Praktiken des Partizipationsmanagements aber auch an der rituellen Anforderungen der Interaktion, am face work im Goffmanschen Sinne. Die Absicherung der Partizipation der aphasischen Ehemänner und Familienväter ist Teil des Bemühens, die Homöostase der innerfamiliären Kommunikation wieder herzustellen und entsprechend adaptierte Problemlösungsstrategien für eine innerfamiliäre community of practice zu etablieren. Das Partizipationsmanagement wird als gemeinsame Aufgabe der Beteiligten realisiert (Prinzip der Kooperativität), wobei die sprachgesunden Ehepartnerinnen eine besondere Verantwortung übernehmen. Die Ehefrauen widmen ihren aphasischen Männern ein hohes Maß an Aufmerksamkeit, fungieren als Sprachrohr, Langzeit- und Arbeitsgedächtnis, als Moderatorinnen, Assistentinnen und face-Manager. Dadurch wird auch ihre eigene Partizipation am Gespräch geprägt.
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Beatrice Whiting's focus on cultural meanings implicit in everyday routines provided a focus for this study of men and women's social networks in a rural Kipsigis community of western Kenya. Using methods from social network analysis, the authors interviewed men and women of the community about the contexts of their encounters with other same-sex community members. The data were analyzed using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis in order to discern the bases of social interaction. Results indicate that mutual helping relationships, not kinship, clan, or age, are at the core of social life in this community.
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The organization of taking turns to talk is fundamental to conversation, as well as to other speech-exchange systems. A model for the turn-taking organization for conversation is proposed, and is examined for its compatibility with a list of grossly observable facts about conversation. The results of the examination suggest that, at least, a model for turn-taking in conversation will be characterized as locally managed, party-administered, interactionally controlled, and sensitive to recipient design. Several general consequences of the model are explicated, and contrasts are sketched with turn-taking organizations for other speech-exchange systems.
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FACTORS CONSIDERED ARE CITY OF RESIDENCE, HOUSEHOLD SIZE, NUMBER OF GENERATIONS IN THE HOUSE, LIFE STYLE, SOCIAL CLASS, AND DENSITY. 10 TABLES INDICATE THE CORRELATIONS OF THE VARIABLES. THE GENERAL FINDING WAS THAT MORE MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY SLEEP TOGETHER IN JAPAN, THEREBY EMPHASIZING FAMILY VS. PERSONAL DEPENDENCE. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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