The Traveller Forum: An Advice-seeking Site Contributing to the Construction of Parental Social Actors and to On-line Parental Bond Creations

Abstract

This paper studies how parental social actors and co-parental relationships are interactively constructed in traveller forums, analysing a corpus obtained from the London for Kids Trip Advisor forum, and carrying out a qualitative study of the interactants’ uses of kids in their choice of transitivity patterns. Starting from a Critical Discourse Analytical methodological framework and from corpus-driven research, I address the question of how participants are endowed with authority and legitimation in parenting matters while engaged in this advice-seeking site. The results point at the emergence of inter-subjective role creations of parenting social actors, of instances of co-parental intrusion or complicity, whose legitimation and investment with authority often falls back on cultural and in general stereotypical presuppositions. The study is of interest for the tourist industry in general. Offering rich, authentic and often unsolicited customer feedback, forums are recognised to provide a cost-effective method to assess the quality of tourist services and consequently improve travellers’ real demands. Through this research, the tourist industry may become aware of how parents construct and project themselves discursively as consumers of touristic services, and adapt these findings to their marketing interests..