Abstract
Although the topic of socialization is central to sociology, much of the traditional research has focused on the asymmetry between parents and children during the socialization process. Clearly, parents actively and tacitly scaffold language development, support the acquisition of key competences, and help frame children’s understandings of the social and natural world. And because parents possess substantially more knowledge of the social world, along with significant social power related to their role within the family dynamic, it is tempting to view adult contributions to socialization as undoubtedly more extensive and significant, especially during infancy and early childhood. However, research on the reciprocal nature of parent-child interaction also demonstrates the pivotal role that children play in their own socialization. In Socialization: Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life, Sara Keel contributes to this latter branch of research by adopting an ethnomethodological/conversation analytic (EM/CA) approach to understanding how young children contribute to their own development through assessment sequences.
Methodologically, the author’s application of an EM/CA approach to audiovisual data not only allows for the production of verbatim transcripts of the naturally occurring conversations but also for a consideration of the myriad ways in which nonverbal gestures, gaze, touch, and other elements of the local setting contribute to the shared production of meaning in family-based social interactions. With a sample of eight French-speaking families, all of which included at least one child between the ages of two and three, the data include 200 hours of family interactions. Working from a “bottom up” orientation, Keel’s analysis proceeds to identify the deviant cases, those that defy standard conversational conventions, as well as common, patterned instances, which are assembled into a collection based on their similar conversational structure. Although a sample of eight families appears small by quantitative standards, the research is actually quite empirically ambitious: transcribing, translating (from French to English), and analyzing roughly 200 hours of data, which contain countless utterances and sequences, along with their constituent nonverbal actions, results in a large sample of such exchanges.
From the beginning, Keel offers an overview of prior research on socialization, eventually locating the project in EM/CA studies of naturally occurring social interaction and establishing it as a means of understanding how socialization occurs in situ, as part of conversational achievement. Although the review of EM/CA studies is not overly lengthy, the jargon and underlying assumptions of the approach may be unfamiliar to some readers. Thus, some readers may find it tedious to meander through the EM/CA respecification of socialization and the detailed discussion of methodology. However, the coverage provides enough background for readers to understand the organization of the analysis and the conclusions advanced throughout the substantive portions of the book.
Because Keel focuses almost exclusively on assessments as the phenomenon of interest, this topic is given substantially more attention. Yet the analysis of the assessments themselves is unambiguously not the goal of the text. Rather, assessments are used as a resource for demonstrating how, and under what conditions, children are able to enact, shape, and contribute to their own socialization in exceedingly intricate and exceptionally skilled ways that reveal a level of competence normally attributed to much older children.
In the substantive chapters of the book, Keel presents several unique findings that not only expand the EM/CA literature but also contribute to a more nuanced understanding of children’s orientation to other participants in social interaction. Although prior research plainly demonstrates that by the age of two, typically developing children can understand turn-taking and canonical conversational sequences, what is less clear is how very young children develop more complex, non-canonical conversational structure and respond when sequences become problematic. Keel shows that when children in this very young age group offer an initial assessment of an object or situation that fails to receive an acceptable response from a parent, they actively pursue a response.
Interestingly, when the children locate the “trouble” in the conversation as one of inattention, they seek a response by repeating their initial assessment, repairing or in some instances redirecting parental attention to the conversation, or bringing the referent to the parent. These practices suggest an attention to the ordered properties of interaction, as well as active solicitation of forthcoming responses, as the young children attempt to enforce conversational rules. Further, the exhibition of this mundane set of utterances and actions places epistemic knowledge and the attribution of emotional and mental states to others much earlier in the child development trajectory than previously believed.
Equally compelling is Keel’s ability to linkthe minutia of these conversational exchanges to elements of social structure. In contrast with some studies that assert asymmetry as a fundamental characteristic of parent-child interaction, the children in Keel’s study illustrate an orientation to the rights and responsibilities of their social role and the social role of their parents, while taking a dynamic role in steering the conversation. In normal conversation, after an initial assessment, agreement is a preferred response, and disagreement generally requires significantly more interactional work. In Keel’s research, when parents respond to initial assessments with only weak agreement tokens, instead of abandoning a response, children attempted to repair or solicit stronger agreement, showing a clear orientation to their own role in securing the preferred response by attempting to sound more “adult-like” or upgrading their assessment to garner a response. More remarkably, when children received disagreement in response to their initial assessments, the timing of the disagreement, as well as the strength, affected the response of children in ways not entirely anticipated. Disagreement did elicit varying responses, including disagreeing actions, resistance, and other complex conversational strategies; however, these tactics appeared to align with children’s appraisal of whether the disagreement response was warranted, per the children’s evaluative positions.
While those unfamiliar with the EMCA approach and transcription style may struggle to understand the transcribing conventions and the style of the resulting analysis, the text offers new insights into child development that merit serious consideration. Using assessment sequences where children initiate noticings, or evaluative statements, the research establishes the complexity of children’s understanding of non-canonical structures, which require significantly more interactional skill to negotiate and deploy. In the process, Keel challenges widely held beliefs about the timing of interactional competence development, as well as theory of mind. Instead of viewing children as merely responding to external environmental stimuli or the scaffolding of their parents, Keel masterfully demonstrates how children’s own unique understandings of their physical world and social interaction are embodied in their utterances and patterns of talk.