On Giving Reasons in Verbal Disputes: The Development of Justifying

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In the past seven years an interest in the discourse structure of children's spontaneous verbal disputes has added new detailed information to the study of children's argumentation (Dunn & Munn, 1987; Eisenberg, 1992; Maynard, 1985; Phinney, 1986; Willbrand & Rieke, 1986). Taking advantage of analytic techniques used in discourse analysis, the purpose of this study is to examine the development of children's argumentation by analyzing the discourse contexts of justifications. By analyzing justifications, the study addresses issues in the development of children's argumentation and interpersonal conflict. Previous Studies of Children's Disputes Conflicts between children have been of interest to developmental psychologists as social and cognitive phenomena for many years; one of the first studies conducted in the early 1930s (Dawe, 1934) investigated the relation between conflicts and social adjustment. Piaget stressed the importance of conflict in cognitive and moral development (Piaget, 1932), while Vygotsky stressed internalization of social interaction and the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), which would also include interpersonal conflicts, as important to cognitive and communicative development. In recent years, however, technological advancements in recording interaction and theoretical advancements in the study of language have created a new sensitivity to the complexities of children's conflicts. Several studies (Eisenberg, 1992; Hay, 1984; Maynard, 1985; Phinney, 1986; Shantz, 1987) have described the nature of arguments among young children in the following ways: arguments are rare and very short events when compared to the rest of children's interactions during a typical day, lasting less than ten turns 90% of the time; the first moves in an argument have a tremendous effect on the rest of the interaction; similarly, the topic of dispute has a tremendous effect on the interaction, and topics change in the course of development from an initial focus on object control to include issues of behavioral control or ideational opposition (differences in beliefs, likes, rules of interaction, moral or conventional transgressions). Dunn & Munn (1987) provided the first study of children's first uses of justifications in spontaneous verbal disputes. In a longitudinal study of 43 children observed at home at 18, 24, and 36 months, they found that justifications were present but very rare at 18 months, occurring in only 4% of all the disputes with mothers. They noted a significant increase in the use of the justifications between 24 and 36 months. The justifications were most likely to occur in disputes over object rights or control; these same types of disputes were also the ones which elicited the most anger and distress at 18 and 24 months. In a study of 4-year-olds' conflicts with their mothers, Eisenberg (1992) found that the children used justifications in 36% of their disputes, and these disputes concerned plans and intentions and also expressed more anger and distress. The study also found that both children and adults used justifications more when they initiated the conflict, and were more likely to use justifications if the other did so previously. Communication theorists and argumentation theorists have also investigated children's verbal disputes, both elicited and spontaneous, in order to broaden the concept of argumentation and reason giving by using analytic techniques from discourse analysis and to examine the development of argumentation (Benoit, 1983; Haslett, 1983; O'Keefe & Benoit, 1982, Willbrand & Rieke, 1986). These studies have found both developmental differences in strategies for resolving disputes (Benoit, 1983) and both developmental and stylistic/personality differences in the use of more mature reasoning strategies in verbal disputes (Haslett, 1983; Willbrand & Rieke, 1986). These studies have focused on explicating the relation between argumentation and interpersonal verbal disputes, trying to understand the relation between reason giving (an argument people make) and interpersonal conflict (an argument people have) (O'Keefe, 1982). …