Collaborative storytelling and hypothetical scenarios about romantic relationships among middle-school peers

Abstract

This study examines how preteen children negotiate and make sense of romantic relationships and index relational norms and boundaries in collaborative storytelling. The analysis draws upon an interactional approach to storytelling and examines how participants collaboratively describe, reshape and elaborate hypothetical scenarios. The interactional approach to storytelling is combined with a sequential analysis of membership categorization work to explore how the peers organize their participation in storytelling practices, while invoking categories to negotiate appropriate and inappropriate romantic relationships. The study demonstrates how children use hypothetical scenarios to turn the storytelling into a time machine for moving across time and space, while orienting to gender, social class and age as central to making sense of romantic relationships in their peer culture.