Managing the moral implications of advice in informal interaction

What does advice-giving look like among family members? Most conversation analytic research on advice has been in institutional settings, which constrain what speakers can do. Here we analyse advice in the apparently freer environment of telephone calls between mothers and their young adult daughters. We concentrate on how the advice is received. Our analysis shows that the position of ‘advice recipient’ is a potentially unwelcome identity to occupy, because it implies one knows less than the advice giver, and indeed that one may be somehow at fault. Advice can be resisted, but choosing to do so seems to depend on what the interactional costs would be. We discuss the implications for studying advice and promoting advice acceptance, as well as the way relationality more generally can be constituted in talk