‘Who is in Your Family?’ Italian Children with Non‐heterosexual Parents Talk about Growing Up in a Non‐conventional Household

The paper presents findings from explorative research conducted in Italy with seven 9‐ to 12‐year‐old children with non‐heterosexual parents. The aim was to find out how children describe their family structure, how they talk about their family with peers, and how they experience peers' attitudes towards non‐heterosexual families. Findings show that children have a flexible and inclusive representation of family and they disclose selectively with their peers who don't always consider homosexuality normal and homoparental families ‘real families’. The paper concludes by suggesting that institutional recognition for same‐sex parenting would support children in the everyday work of negotiating diversity.     

Assessment for home care: Negotiating solutions for individual needs

This article explores care management as an activity that regulates the distribution of society's resources for home care. It focuses on interaction in assessment meetings, which are part of the planning of services and care for old people in Sweden. The aim was to acquire an understanding of how old people, as applicants, account for their needs for care, and how these accounts are negotiated and positioned in talk. Twenty home care assessments were audio-taped and the data were analyzed using discursive analysis. It was found that the assessment meetings had an institutional structure within, which old people, as applicants and with individual needs for care, were assessed within fixed institutional categories. Furthermore, analysis showed how interaction during assessment meetings functioned as formal problem-solving, in which applicants' accounts of their health issues were negotiated, contributing to the construction of their identity as home care receivers.     

“We are on air now”: the emotionality of video-recording in the institutional setting

Abstract

This article engages with the practice of video recording in social research. We draw on our research of institutional talk to explore the emotionality of video recording in the context of the studied situations. Drawing on insights from Collins’ theory of interaction rituals, we demonstrate a variety of situational moments in which different participants negotiate the presence of a video camera. Our analysis reveals the emotional aspects of negotiating and appropriating the presence of such technologies by all parties involved in the research process. We contribute to and extend the growing body of literature that discusses the meaning of technology for social research by emphasizing the emotionality of using video cameras in social and research practices.     

Organization of work in interaction between the paramedics and the patient

The paper analyzes the ways in which the two paramedics organize their work activities in the courses of interaction with the patient. The paramedic-patient -interaction is generally based on question-answer -sequences where one paramedic asks a question to which the patient answers. The paper examines the organization of paramedics' institutional roles and responsibilities within these particular sequences of talk by conversation analytic means. Instead of leaning on any personal or psychological explanations, the paper aims to demonstrate how particular breaches or problems in the organization of division of labour become explainable and understandable through the detailed analysis of preceding interaction. The main research data consist of the videorecordings of naturally occurring interactions between paramedics and patient.     

TROUBLES TALK AND COUNSELING DISCOURSE

Counseling is a pervasive activity in contemporary institutional life. This article focuses on the ways in which troubles—as socially constructed realities—are talked into being in two counseling settings: a British hemophilia center that counsels individuals who have become HIV-positive through the transfusion of infected blood products and a family therapy center in the United States. Drawing upon conversation analytic studies of "troubles talk," three major topical and interactional continuities in the two settings are revealed. They involve trouble definitions, trouble remedies, and accessing the social contexts of clients' troubles. Using ideas from Foucault, the article analyzes counseling as a professional technology for inciting troubles talk. As such, counseling functions as one of a variety of institutional discourses within which troubles talk may be elicited and organized, power moves, and people may be constructed as objects of power. The article thus serves as an initial attempt to synthesize strands of Foucauldian and conversation analytic work at an empirical, rather than purely theoretical, level.     

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender and interaction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empirically via its categorial reference in talk‐in‐interaction. I begin by charting the history of ethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel's groundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a more general discussion of feminism's relationship to ethnomethodology. I then consider two related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other in membership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication of gender's relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise different problems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how ‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequential organization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conversation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members' categories in their sequential environment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ ( Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).     

Legal discourse and the cultural intelligiblity of gendered meanings1

This paper considers the methodological challenges that ‘post-modern’ approaches to gender ( Cameron 2005 ) pose for the field of language and gender. If we assume that gender cannot be ‘read off’ the identities of speakers, but rather is a social process by which individuals come to make cultural sense, then how do we best investigate this process? As Stokoe (2005) and Stokoe and Smithson (2002) have argued, it is problematic within such frameworks to conduct research that pre-categorizes individuals as women and men, since it is individuals' constitution as women or men that should be the issue under investigation. Indeed, for Butler (1990: 145), to understand ‘identity as a practice … is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse’ (emphasis in original). This suggests that we attend to cultural norms of intelligibility (i.e. the ‘rule-bound discourse’) and their effects. Following Blommaert (2005) and Woolard (forthcoming) , in this paper I investigate a speech event, a courtroom trial dealing with sexual assault, where understandings of social identities and categories (i.e. ‘norms of intelligibility’) are not only evident in the local talk of speakers and hearers, but also in the recontextualizations of this local talk by powerful institutional representatives (i.e. judges). By examining such recontextualizations of courtroom talk, gender is not ‘read off’ the identities of individuals (i.e. courtroom participants) but rather investigated as it appears in the cultural sense-making frameworks of judges. Moreover, given that judges are the ultimate interpreters of the linguistic representations of courtroom talk, this paper also demonstrates some of the social consequences associated with the performance of culturally intelligible and unintelligible gendered identities.     

Baby talk to the babyfaced

The power of an infantile appearance to elicit baby talk was investigated by assessing the use of baby talk in task instructions to four-year-old children, who were portrayed as either relatively babyfaced or maturefaced. Men and women taught two tasks to a randomly selected boy or girl via a telephone conversation after being shown a photograph, which presumably depicted the child whom they were instructing. Paralleling facial differences between babies and adults, babyfaced children had rounder faces, larger eyes, thinner eyebrows, and smaller noses than the maturefaced. As predicted, adults used more baby talk when instructing babyfaced than maturefaced children. This effect was manifested in linguistic indicators of baby talk (slow timing and high clarification, simplification, and attention maintenance), as well as in paralinguistic indicators of baby talk (high pitch and changing intonation). The receipt of linguistic baby talk, in turn, facilitated the child's ability to choose a card which matched the one being described. The fact that facial babyishness influenced baby talk even when baby- and maturefaced children were equated in age, attractiveness, and perceived competence suggests that a small approximation to the craniofacial qualities that distinguish infants from adults may in and of itself be sufficient to elicit this speech register.This research was supported by NIMH grant #BSR5 R01 MH42684 to the first author. The authors would like to express their appreciation to the Brandeis University and Wellesley College Daycare Centers for their cooperation in this research. Thanks are also extended to Stacy Silberman for serving as one of the experimenters and to Becky Gilbert, Katina Lawdis, Sheryl Levy, and Liz Tighe for their help in coding the data.     

Reactions of Inner-City Boys and Their Mothers to Research Interviews About Sex

Abstract

Our understanding of child sexuality is very unsatisfactory, in part because research in this area has progressed slowly due to concerns of parents, institutional review boards, school authorities, granting and community agents. Some members of these groups worry that this line of inquiry will have adverse consequences, such as causing distress in child participants or stimulating them to engage in sexual activities. The current study constitutes an exploratory investigation of the reactions of 98 boys (7-13 years) and their 84 mothers after completing individual interviews as part of a larger HIV-related study on the development of sexual behaviors. Most boys reported feeling positively about their participation, were not upset by any aspects of their participation, and indicated willingness to participate again. Most mothers had similar positive reactions. However, considerable reticence was noted on behalf of some boys in their responses to sexual knowledge questions as compared to other portions of the interview. This reticence appeared attributable primarily to limited sexual vocabulary knowledge, and learned inhibitions regarding sex talk with adults. Further refinement of methodologies appropriate for interviewing children about sex is needed.     

From First Principles: Toward a More Reflexive Social Science

In the United States and in other countries as well there are a number of government and philanthropic initiatives to help more people, particularly those from low-income backgrounds, enter and succeed in postsecondary education. These initiatives typically involve remedial education (because a significant number of students are academically underprepared) and vocational or occupational education (called Career and Technical Education in the United States) because many students elect an occupational pathway. On the remedial front, policy makers are calling for reform of remedial education, for it has proven to present various barriers to degree completion. On the CTE front, policy makers want more academic work integrated into career courses believed to better prepare students for the demands of the new economy. But both remediation and CTE emerge from and carry with them assumptions about knowledge and learning that limit their effectiveness, and these assumptions are reinforced by institutional structures and status dynamics and by the forces of social class. This article (based on a talk given at the American Educational Research Association) examines these assumptions with the goal of moving beyond them. It also offers some reflection on the research methodology best suited to explore such complex social topics as remediation and occupational education.     

Cultural Schemas of Religion,Science, and Law in Talk About Social Controversies

We analyze cultural schemas of religion, science, and law reflected in the way ordinary citizens discuss contemporary social controversies and assess whether these schemas accord with a modernization narrative or whether people's experiences with each of these institutional arenas lead them to adopt realistic or critical schemas not predicted by modernization accounts. Focus group participants in three metropolitan areas were asked to talk about one of three vignettes on faith‐based prison ministries, parents’ refusal of medical treatment for a child on religious grounds, or preimplantation genetic diagnosis of human embryos. We find that people's everyday experiences, grounded in specific institutional contexts, produce perceptions of the domains of religion, science, and law that are not fully captured by the modernization account. Further, our findings illustrate that schemas of law, science, and religion are varied and evoked by social context and the specific issues under consideration. Schemas that do not fit the modernization framework provide a way for people to address concerns about power and effectively level the playing field between more and less rationalized social domains. Future research on a broader range of issues is needed to develop a theory of when different schemas of law, science, and religion are activated.     

‘My Mother Thinks that this is the Case,and so Does My Teacher. I,for My Part,Do Not Notice Any Difference’: Methodological Reflections on Intersubjectivity in the Research Process with Children

This article illustrates why the notion of intersubjectivity is important when conducting interviews with children. Even though intersubjectivity is often undermined in educational activity as well as in research with children, it needs to be established and maintained in order to make the children talk and the adults listen. By discussing some interview material from a research project in which children diagnosed with AD[H]D talk about their medication, the authors show how creative the children are when expressing their subjective meanings, and how helpless the adults often are when they do not at first understand the children. Here, intersubjectivity is realised when the adult interviewer manages to understand the children's expressions as their efforts to convey their ideas. Children who struggle to express themselves and communicate need to rely on adults' empathy and understanding.     

THEORETICAL VALIDITY AND EMPIRICAL UTILITY OF A CONSTRUCTIONIST ANALYTICS

Wing‐Chung Ho offers an extensive critique of what he calls our “radical constructionist approach to family experience,” questioning the theoretical validity and empirical utility of the research program. This article responds to the charges in the broader context of the program's constructionist analytics, discussing family's experiential location, organizational embeddedness, and the importance of ethnographic sensibility. A brief extract of situated talk and interaction is presented to illustrate the discursive complexity and institutional bearings of family as a category of experience. The conclusion takes up the issue of whether the program is radical in conceptualization and empirical realization.     

Identifying units in interaction: Reactive tokens in Korean and English conversations

Reactive tokens are conversational resources by which a listener co‐constructs a speaker's turn at talk. The resources that are available include the forms of the reactive tokens themselves, their duration, and their placement by the listener in the current speaker's turn. The present paper is a contrastive study of the use of these resources by Americans in English, and by Koreans in their native language and in English, and in it we show the ecological relationship between the resources that a language provides and their use in constructing active listenership. Although previous research on English has found listeners use reactive tokens to pass up the opportunity for a full turn at talk, we show that, in Korean, reactive tokens are often elicited by the current speaker and the listener is obligated to provide them. We present evidence that Korean bilinguals transfer some conversational resources from their native language when they take part in conversation in English.     

Factory “Homers”: Understanding a Highly Elusive,Marginal, and Illegal Practice

A “homer” is an artifact that a worker produces using company tools and materials outside normal production plans but at the workplace and during workhours. Despite legal, artistic and ethnographic evidence of their existence, silence surrounds homers. Along with this evidence, interviews conducted mostly with retirees from a French aeronautics plant are used to show that this silence is not linked just to the marginal and illegal quality of these artifacts. Homers shed light on a high degree of “complicity” between employees regardless of their position in the hierarchy. Since the factory's institutional framework has little room for this complicity, the silence surrounding homers is a sign probably of an inability to talk about them rather than of their marginality or illegality.     

Why privacy keeps dying: the trouble with talk about the end of privacy

It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for decades, but there has never been a near consensus about its causes. Second, unlike other endist talk (the end of art or history, etc.), privacy endism appears ongoing and not period specific. Finally, our explanation of the persistence and idiosyncrasy of claims to the end of privacy focuses on Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 negative conception of privacy as ‘the right to be let alone’: namely, modern privacy talk has always been endist because the right to privacy was born out of the conditions for its violation, not its realization. The conclusion comments on implications of that basic proposition.     

Surveying the European Public Space - A Political and Research Agenda

This paper examines the reasons why it is justified to talk about a European 'democratic deficit'. The creation and consolidation of a European public space necessitates conceptual clarification at the normative theoretical level - as liberal democracy is historically closely bound to the nation-state - and action at the policy and political levels. A Union of European Citizens is a step towards, but not equivalent to, a democratic Union based on European citizenship. Formal announcements, normative convictions, or even institutional reforms are not enough to guarantee openness or support contestation. European democracy is de facto a process to be observed but it is also a project to be defined. The article outlines an agenda for European democracy both with regard to political deliberation and empirical research.     

La « perruque » en usine : approche d’une pratique marginale, illégale et fuyante

A “homer” is an artifact that a worker produces using company tools and materials outside normal production plans but at the workplace and during workhours. Despite legal, artistic and ethnographic evidence of their existence, silence surrounds homers. Along with this evidence, interviews conducted mostly with retirees from a French aeronautics plant are used to show that this silence is not linked just to the marginal and illegal quality of these artifacts. Homers shed light on a high degree of “complicity” between employees regardless of their position in the hierarchy. Since the factory’s institutional framework has little room for this complicity, the silence surrounding homers is a sign probably of an inability to talk about them rather than of their marginality or illegality.