Building family: the interactional practices of families with young children

This dissertation employs the methods of Conversation Analysis to examine a collection of more than 30 hours of naturally-occurring video-recordings of families with young children. In building upon prior research regarding family communication and conversation analysis, this dissertation furthers our understanding of three communication practices that are recurrent in everyday family life: recruiting, updating, and monitoring object identification. First, I analyze the activity of recruiting, finding that wanna-format recruiting is more versatile than let’s-format recuiting. Let’s-format recruiting occurs only when the interactants are already engaged in an activity together, whereas wanna-format recruiting can occur then and when the interactants are not engaged together in an activity. Second, I examine how updating comes about in family interactions. I show how children produce updates in ways that are locally occasioned and how parents solicit updates from their children. If a child indicates some difficulty in responding to a solicited update, parents can work to scaffold subsequent update solicitations. Third, I examine how apposite object identification becomes relevant in family interactions. I examine parent and child monitoring of apposite object identification in reference to objects/items. Findings indicate that there is an ongoing monitoring of object identification in these family interactions, and that both parents and young children exploit this pervasive monitoring of apposite object identification to accomplish other actions. Overall, this dissertation has broader implications for our understanding of family communication, children’s interactional sophistication, and conversation analytic research. Future work could build on the findings presented in this dissertation in examining young children’s exploitation of ongoing courses of action, as well as work to provide practical implications for families with young children. Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesDarcey Searle