“Am I a good boy?”: Explicit membership categorization in parent–child interaction

Abstract

This paper examines moments in which desired categories such as “good boy/girl” are invoked explicitly in parent–child conversations. Guided by Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) and Conversation Analysis (CA), we describe the sequential contexts of these explicit categorical identities and the interactional practices that parents and children employ to refer to and negotiate them. The data are drawn from a 120-h corpus of audio recordings of parent–child conversations involving two- to five-year-old girls and boys in five Singaporean middle-class families. The findings suggest that children's categorical identities are often mentioned explicitly in assessments, request negotiation, contracts involving a reward, and prayers. Once a category has been introduced by the parent in talk, the child may resist or affiliate with it. There is also evidence that a child can bring up a desired category in ways that reflect how that category has been co-constructed in previous interactions. In light of the findings, we discuss the nature of children's competencies as social members and the potential emergence of competence in talk-in-interaction.