Socialization: Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life

Sara Keel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317053224
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Adopting a conversation analytic approach informed by ethnomethodology, this book examines the process of socialization as it takes place within everyday parent–child interactions. Based on a large audio-visual corpus featuring footage of families filmed extensively in their homes, the author focuses on the initiation of interactive assessment sequences on the part of young children with their parents and the manner in which, by means of embodied resources, such as talk, gaze, and gesture, they acquire communicative skills and a sense of themselves as effective social actors.

With attention to the responses of parents and their understanding of their children's participation in exchanges, and the implications of these for children's communication this book sheds new light on the ways in which parents and children achieve shared understanding, how they deal with matters of 'alignment' or 'disalignment' and issues related to their respective membership categories.

As a rigorous and detailed study of children's early socialization as well as the structural and embodied organization of communicative sequences, Socialization: Parent–Child Interaction in Everyday Life will appeal to scholars of sociology and child development with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, early years socialization and the sociology of family life.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Socialization: A Longstanding Object of Study

It is in The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language of 1828 that the expression to socialize makes its first appearance, referring to a process whose aim is “to render social, to make fit for living in society” (Clausen 1968: 21). According to this first definition, it cannot be taken for granted that individuals naturally fit into a given social order. To behave in such a manner as might be required by a given social environment, they need to be prepared and to undergo a process of adaptation and apprenticeship controlled by those considered to be the competent members of society.

Half a century later, it was Georg Simmel who introduced the term socialization (Simmel 1894: 54) in social theory, but emphasizing aspects other than those in the first definition given above. Simmel thought of society (or unity) as something that existed and was produced wherever several individuals are engaged in reciprocal relationships, or Wechselwirkungen (Simmel 1909: 296). According to Simmel, reciprocity between individuals is generated by specific impulses—of a sexual or religious nature, or arising out of specific purposes or interests such as defense, attack, gain, or instruction—that lead individuals to act for or against each other, or more generally bring them to various forms of “being-together.” However, Simmel also argued that these generic conditions of association (impulses, purposes, and so on) not only influence individuals’ engagement in reciprocal relationships, but also are shaped (brought into being) by individuals’ engagement in reciprocal relationships. Accordingly, it is through these reciprocal relationships that society—being the “sum of these reciprocal relationships”—is perpetually realized (Simmel 1890: 131). Simmel considered the form(s) of socialization (Vergesellschaftung) to be a more appropriate concept than society for designating something that is perpetually produced through a dynamic, interactive process (Simmel 1917: 13). He felt that the analysis of these forms of socialization should be the priority object of study for sociology: “If, therefore, there is to be a science, the object of which is to be ‘society’ and nothing else, it can investigate only these reciprocal influences, these kinds and forms of socialization” (Simmel 1909: 297–8).

These first uses of the notion to socialize (Clausen 1968: 21) and the term socialization (Simmel 1909: 297) foreshadowed the two main lines of investigation that were developed within the different theories and studies of socialization over the course of the twentieth century (Terrail 1995: 118). The first one looks at the processes through which individuals are integrated into a given society and/or social order (Grundmann 2006: 9). Its main question can be summarized as follows: “How are human beings produced as social beings that conform to a pre-existing social order?” This line of investigation presumes first that individuals are mainly socialized, shaped, and modeled by others, and second, that the socialization consists of producing individuals that produce or reproduce a given pre-existing social order (Terrail 1995: 118). Its adepts are thus predominantly concerned with the individual’s attachment to a larger community. They seek to examine and to understand the different social contexts within which socialization takes place and to show their distinct impact on the individual’s development (Grundmann 2006: 19; Hurrelmann, Grundmann and Walper 2008).

The second line of investigation is interested in revealing how individuals produce, negotiate, and modify social order and society, and in showing how the to-be-socialized individual actively participates in dynamic process(es) of this kind (Grundmann 2006: 9; Hurrelmann, Grundmann and Walper 2008: 14; Terrail 1995: 118). Consequently, this line of investigation seeks to answer the following questions: How are individuals enabled to produce social actions? How are they brought to actively participate in the production of social life? (Grundmann 2006: 9, 19). It is primarily concerned with individuals’ self-development, examining it as something that is achieved and transformed through social interactions, and which exists in a relationship of mutual interdependency with the social and material environment in which individuals come into adulthood. In contrast to the first line of investigation, whose analytical focus seeks to reveal the environmental (social, economic, and cultural) factors that shape individuals’ development, the second line of investigation highlights the agency of developing individuals and aims to show to what extent and how they are active contributors and/or producers of their own development and socialization (Hurrelmann, Grundmann and Walper 2008: 14–15). In its broadest sense, and as Cromdal puts it, socialization thus refers to an infinite “array of social events” taking place in ordinary family life, on the playground, on the football pitch, and/or in institutional settings such as the school, the nursery, the university, or the workplace, “through which people become skilled in the ways of society” (Cromdal 2006: 462).

Socialization: Everyday Parent/Adult-Child Interactions

In their paper “On Formal Structures of Practical Actions,” Garfinkel and Sacks (1986)—the founders of ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), respectively—declare that the notion of being a competent “member” of society does not refer to a person, but to the “mastery of language” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1986: 163). According to the authors, a member is thus not just any person that happens to live and interact in a given society. Instead, being a member amounts to being a competent user of natural language, for example, someone who is able to use language to achieve practical actions such as greetings, requests, or offers, and to display practical reasoning, practical circumstances, and common-sense knowledge in a way that is understandable for other members of society. Concretely, this means that a greeting is not only to be accomplished in a way that ensures it is understood by the intended recipient, but also that it is interactively effective—that is, it gets a greeting in return. In this sense, the acquisition of the interactional and linguistic competences and common-sense knowledge needed to competently use natural language constitute the central aim of childhood socialization (Heritage 1984a: 239).

In recent years, a large number of EM/CA studies on children’s everyday interactions with others have been carried out. Based upon audiovisual recordings, these studies describe and analyze the concrete organization of the everyday interactions of children and adolescents taking place at their homes (Butler and Fitzgerald 2010; Cekaite 2010; Fasulo, Loyd and Padiglione 2007; Filipi 2009, 2013; Forrester 2008, 2013; Goodwin, M. 2007; Wootton 1997, 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2010), at the playground (Butler 2008; Butler and Weatherall 2006; Goodwin, M. 2006), and in or around the school or nursery (Cekaite and Aronsson 2005; Coob-Moore, Danby and Farrell 2008; Emanuelsson and Sahlström 2008; Kidwell 2005, 2009, 2012; Kidwell and Zimmerman 2006, 2007; Macbeth 2003, 2011; Pekarek Doehler 2010b; Sahlström 2002, 2009; Sidnell 2010a). A central aim of these detailed descriptions is to reveal children’s competences in methodically deploying gaze, gestures, and language to produce meaningful and intelligible actions and in understanding the actions of others for what they are. Taking young children’s mobilization of embodied resources into account makes it possible to demonstrate that even before fully mastering natural language, young children deploy a whole range of linguistic, cognitive, and interactive competences: they might identify a problem in their own talk and propose an appropriate repair without parental intervention (Corrin 2010; Forrester 2008), or they might very early on in life (from the age of 11 months onwards) combine gestures, gaze, and vocalization to produce a recognizable action, such as a request, that projects a response from the intended recipient, and to pursue a response if none is forthcoming (see Chapter 4; see Filipi 2009; Jones and Zimmerman 2003; Wootton 1997). Beyond contributing to a better understanding of the embodied organization of social interaction, these studies show how, from an early age, the child initiates sequences of interactions, and is not merely reacting to the actions of (more competent) others. This line of research thus provides evidence of young children’s non-trivial contribution to their own socialization/acquisition of interactive competences.

Young Children’s and Parents’ Organization of Assessment Sequences and its Relevance for the Study of Socialization

On the basis of a large audio-visual corpus of everyday parent–child interactions, my study looks at the embodied ways in which young children (between 2 and 3 years-of-age) achieve initial assessments and examines how parents respond. The existing EM/CA literature on children of this age range is very limited. Indeed, quite a few studies look at the interactions of very young children—between nine and 18 months-of-age—(Corrin 2010; Filipi 2007, 2009; Jones and Zimmerman 2003: 178; Kidwell 2005, 2009; Kidwell and Zimmerman 2006, 2007; Lerner and Zimmerman 2003; Lerner, Zimmerman and Kidwell 2007, 2011), or examine the organization of interactions involving children of 3 years old and above—somewhat older than those of my study (Butler 2008; Butler and Weatherall 2006; Cekaite 2006, 2010; Church 2009; Coob-Moore, Danby and Farrell 2008; Goodwin, M. 1990, 2006, 2007; Sidnell 2010a; Wootton 2006b, 2007). Very few studies focus on interactions involving children who are between 2 and 3 years old, and if they do, they concentrate on a few extracts produced by one child (Butler and Fitzgerald 2010), or constitute single case studies following the developmental trajectory of one child (Forrester 2008; Forrester and Cherington 2009; Wootton 1997, 2010) or of a few children ranging from 10 months to 5 years-of-age (Laakso 2010). For example, Forrester (2008) and Cherington (Forrester and Cherington 2009) examine the emerging capacity of the first author’s child to repair her own talk, and Wootton (1997) examines his own daughter’s developing practices for accomplishing requests. There is thus a research gap that warrants the selection of this particular age group for the central focus of my study.

Furthermore, I am particularly interested in young children’s emerging interactive competence—especially their use of natural language—and in the way young children’s language use is treated by their parents. Between the ages of 18 and 24 months, young children undergo a period of rapid lexical growth (Bassano 2000; Petitto 1993, Veneziano 2000). From their second birthday onward, natural language becomes more and more important for communicating with others (Filipi 2009). It thus seemed most promising to choose an age group in which children’s linguistic (and, presumably, interactive) competences undergo significant changes.

In everyday family life, young children recurrently produce initial assessments such as “yuck,” “that is beautiful,” “[the man] is tall,” and “that’s difficult” (Keel 2012): in the corpus as a whole, I identified 483 occurrences of this. By deploying assessments, speakers display their normative “position” and express their “affective involvement” toward the object, activity, or person being referred to (Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M. 1987: 9). As Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M. (1987: 7-10) argue, to make their assessment understandable for others, speakers might deploy a whole array of embodied resources ranging from various facial expressions, postures, or intonations, to linguistic and syntactic constructions of varying degrees of complexity. Studies on adults’ production of assessments have shown that depending on the embodied, sequential, and linguistic resources speakers mobilize when producing initial assessments, a whole range of so-called non-canonical actions (Stivers and Rossano 2010: 9; Chapter 4; see also Keel 2015) such as noticings, announcements, informings, complaints, and compliments, might be achieved (Keel 2011; Lindström and Heinemann 2009; Mondada 2009a: 352, 2009b; Peräkylä and Ruusuvuori 2006; Pomerantz 1978, 1984a: 63; Ruusuvuori and Peräkylä 2009). It has been suggested that in terms of getting a response from the intended recipient, non-canonical actions might imply more interactive work by the speaker than canonical actions (Stivers and Rossano 2010: 5).

Furthermore, it has been stressed that assessments imply a claim of access to and/or knowledge of the referent (Mondada 2009a; Pomerantz 1984a). If an adequate response is to be obtained from the intended recipient, he or she must have this access and/or knowledge. To be interactively effective, the producer thus needs to ensure the recipient’s access to or knowledge of the referent. For all these reasons, my analytical work on young children’s production of initial assessments first aims to answer the following questions:

• How do young children mobilize and coordinate different interactive resources, such as sequential positions, gestures, facial expressions, and language, to accomplish different social actions (assessments, noticings, or self-praise)?
• How do young children coordinate these resources to ensure the intended recipient’s access to/knowledge of the referent?
• More generally, how do children make a response from the intended recipient observably relevant? That is, how do they organize their assessment in such a way that the addressed participant is obliged to respond?

The existing EM/CA studies on young children’s participation in social interactions referred to above focus on young children’s production of so-called canonical action types (Stivers and Rossano 2010: 5-6) such as offers, questions, or different types of requests (Butler and Wilkinson 2013; Filipi 2009; Jones and Zimmerman 2003; Wootton 1997, 2007). In contrast, the three research questions outlined above make it possible to offer a methodical analysis of young children’s embodied accomplishment of initial assessments that achieve a wide range of non-canonical actions (Stivers and Rossano 2010: 9). It thus focuses on a conversational phenomenon that has not yet been systematically examined in the scope of EM/CA studies on parent–child interactions and makes it possible to shed some new light on young children’s embodied display of cognitive, linguistic, and interactive competences that have not yet been addressed in these terms.

Second, my analytical work is devoted to the ways in which parents respond to their young children’s initial assessments (Chapters 5–6). Systematic studies of assessment sequences produced by adults (Pomerantz 1975, 1984a) suggest that the production of a first assessment by speaker A makes relevant a response by speaker B, and that this response most frequently comes in the form of a second assessment:

A: That’s a r- a (rerry good buy)

B: Great buy. (Pomerantz 1975: 22)

With his or her immediate second assessment, B expresses his or her understanding/ interpretation of the previous turn as one that calls for a response: with the use of the qualifier “great” (instead of repeating A’s “rerry”), B’s second assessment is upgraded. As such, it expresses his or her clear agreement with A’s initial assessment. As highlighted by Pomerantz (1975, 1984a), B’s second assessment can be upgraded or downgraded with respect to the initial one; this would express B’s strong agreement or disagreement with it, respectively. Alternatively, B’s response can take the form of a same evaluation (see Pomerantz 1975: 21) and thus manifest B’s weak agreement or even indicate his or her incipient disagreement with the initial assessment. Furthermore, it has been argued that both the frequent use of upgraded second assessments by adults to respond to initial assessments and the formal production of these assessments—they are produced in a clear and straightforward manner and come immediately after completion of, or in slight overlap with, the initial assessment—show the adults’ preference for agreement over disagreement (Pomerantz 1984a, 1975) and index their orientation toward solidarity and “face” maintenance (Heritage 1984a: 265, 2008: 18–19).

More recently, Heritage and Raymond have suggested that detailed investigation of assessment sequences makes it possible to reveal how participants orient toward interactants’ different epistemic rights to assess something (Heritage and Raymond 2005; Raymond and Heritage 2006). According to the authors, participants in a conversation tend, for example, to treat a child’s grandmother as having greater epistemic rights to assess the grandchild, and thus to assert her normative stance and to claim direct epistemic access, than would a simple acquaintance of the child’s family. It has been argued that interactants’ orientation toward distinct epistemic rights is demonstrated in the sequential and formal production of their responses to initial assessments (Heritage and Raymond 2005).

As put forward by Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M. (1992: 184), interactants’ organization of assessment sequences thus constitutes a key opportunity to analyze participants’ normative positioning, affective involvement with the surrounding world, and negotiation and/or demonstration of a shared understanding of this world. In this sense, their systematic examination constitutes an interesting conversational object for studying “cognition in action” (Jones and Zimmermann 2003; Wootton 1997, 2006a), and for investigating the interplay between cognition, language, and culture (Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M. 1992: 181–4).

Hence, the analytical work on parents’ responses to their young children’s initial assessments seeks to offer a systematic examination along the following research lines:

• How do parents treat initial assessments produced by their young children? Do they respond at all?
• How do they formally and sequentially produce their responses? Do they adhere to the preference for agreement over disagreement?
• What might observed particularities (in terms of sequencing or formality) tell us about the relationship between parents and children?

In summary, this study seeks first to uncover the methodical use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Study of Socialization: Historical Context and Respecification by Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis
• 3 Data/Collection/Transcription
• 4 Young Children’s Repetitions of Initial Assessments and their Orientation toward Conditional Relevance
• 5 Parents’ Agreements with Children’s Initial Assessments: What About the Preference for Agreement in Everyday Family Life?
• 6 Parents’ Disagreements with Children’s Initial Assessments: What About the Dispreference for Disagreement in Everyday Family Life?
• 7 Concluding Comments
• Appendix
• References
• Index