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The purpose of this paper is to propose the activity‐based focus group as a useful method with which to generate talk‐in‐interaction among pre‐schoolers. Analytically, it aims to illustrate how transcribed talk‐in‐interaction can be subjected to a discourse analytic lens, to produce insights into how pre‐schoolers use “Coca‐Cola” as a conversational resource with which to build product‐related meanings and social selves.

Fourteen activity‐based discussion groups with pre‐schoolers aged between two and five years have been conducted in a number of settings including privately run Montessori schools and community based preschools in Dublin. The talk generated through these groups has been transcribed using the conventions of conversation analysis (CA). Passages of talk characterized by the topic of Coca‐Cola were isolated and a sub‐sample of these are analysed here using a CA‐informed discourse analytic approach.

A number of linguistic repertoires are drawn on, including health, permission and age. Coca‐Cola is constructed as something which is “bad” and has the potential to make one “mad”. It is an occasion‐based product permitted by parents for example as a treat, at the cinema or at McDonalds. It can be utilised to build “age‐based” social selves. “Big” boys or girls can drink Coca‐Cola but it is not suitable for “babies”.

This paper provides insight into the use of the activity‐based focus group as a data generation tool for use with pre‐schoolers. A discourse analytic approach to the interpretation of children's talk‐in‐interaction suggests that the preschool consumer is competent in accessing and employing a consumer artefact such as Coca‐Cola as a malleable resource with which to negotiate product meanings and social selves.

The aim of this paper is to investigate actors' ways of sensemaking through the use of rhetorical strategies, frames, and categories, in a management team meeting.

The empirical data were generated from a video recorded and transcribed management meeting, and participant observation. The analysis of institutional discourses and practices builds upon the assumption that language and texts are the main tools for understanding actors' social reality. The managers' ways of sensemaking of institutional discourses and practices is captured through their use of tools like rhetorical strategies, frames, and categories in talk‐in‐interaction.

The team managers' ways of sensemaking through mobilizing rhetorical strategies, institutional categories, and how they recontextualise frames in negotiation of a disputed issue, adds new aspects to previous studies of the multi voiced complex integration processes in a cross‐border acquisition. The significance of the results is the revealing of actors' frequent use of rhetorical strategies, frames, and categories in sensemaking processes. The study calls for further research on structural features of institutional talk as related to the dynamics of talk‐in‐interaction.

The findings and methods of analysis contribute to international business studies and to the empirical‐based research on institutional interaction through text and talk.

Purpose – This chapter explicates the categorical resources and practices used in some disputes involving two children.

Methodology – The data on which the study is based consists of a transcript of an audio recording of the naturally occurring talk-in-interaction during a family meal. This data is analyzed using the approach of membership categorization analysis (MCA).

Findings – We show that it is neither the category collection “children” nor the category collection “siblings” that is relevant for the organization of these disputes but rather a number of asymmetrical standardized relational pairs, such as “rule-enforcer” and “offender” or “offender” and “victim.” It is these pairs of categories that are demonstrably relevant for the members, providing for and making intelligible their disputes. We then consider the question of the demonstrably relevant “wider context” of the disputes to which the disputants are actually oriented. This wider context is an omnirelevant oppositional social relationship between the children. We demonstrate that the disputes reflexively constitute the character of their oppositional relationship and show how these are instantiations of an omnirelevant category collection, namely, “parties to an oppositional relationship.”

Value of chapter – This chapter contributes to the corpus of ethnomethodological studies on children's culture in action and more particularly on the categorical organization of children's (and others’) disputes. It also contributes to MCA more generally in respect to its focus on the issues of omnirelevance and the “occasionality” of category collections.

The aim of this study is to investigate sensemaking as interaction among team members in a multi‐professional team setting in a new public management context at a Swedish Child and Youth Psychiatric Unit.

A discursive pragmatic approach grounded in ethonomethodology is taken in the analysis of a treatment conference (TC). In order to interpret and understand the multi‐voiced complexity of discourse and of talk‐in‐interaction, the authors use dialogism in the analysis of the members' sensemaking processes. The analysis is based on the theoretical assumption that language and texts are the primary tools actors use to comprehend the social reality and to make sense of their multi‐professional discussions. Health care managers are offered insights, derived from theory and empirical evidence, into how professionals' communications influence multi‐professional cooperation. The team leader and members are interviewed before and after the observed TC.

Team members create their identities and positions in the group by interpreting and “misinterpreting” talk‐in‐interaction. The analyses reveal the ways the team members relate to their treatment methods in the discussion of a patient; advocating a treatment method means that the team member and the method are intertwined.

The findings may be valuable to health care professionals and managers working in teams by showing them how to achieve greater cooperation through the use of verbal abilities.

The findings and methods contribute to the international research on cooperation problems in multi‐professional teams and to the empirical research on institutional discourse through text and talk.

Purpose – Disputes provide a way for children to negotiate how they stand in relationship to one another in the local peer group interaction (Goodwin, 1990, 2006). This study follows the everyday peer disputes and classroom negotiations of a peer group of 8-year-old to 12-year-old Turkish–English speaking (and Meskhetian Turkish–English–Russian speaking) children attending a Turkish Saturday School in the United States, where a monolingual Turkish norm is projected by the teachers, to see how these institutional language norms are used as a resource for the peers to conduct their everyday interactions.

Methodology/approach – This study combines methods of ethnography (data are drawn from a year-long ethnography which followed children's everyday language practices in two school settings) and talk-in-interaction, specifically Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks, 1972, 1992).

Findings – Children draw upon the monolingual school norm of using Turkish only, and speaking Turkish correctly, by way of positioning themselves moment-to-moment during disputes with one another. Through repeated appeals to their teachers to relax the Turkish-only rule, they also collaboratively index “speaking English” as a positive category-bound activity (Cekaite & Evaldsson, 2008; Evaldsson, 2007), influencing the local moral order of the peer group.

Social implications/originality/value of chapter – The study provides a view of how children living in a transnational society orient to wider societal structures and “build the phenomenal and social worlds they inhabit” (Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2012) as part of their everyday disputes and negotiations with one another.

Purpose – In this chapter, the use and organization of conditional threats are analysed in relation to preschool children's disputes.

Methodology – Using conversation analysis, naturally occurring examples of children's threats observed in preschool classrooms demonstrate how conditional threats are placed, used and analysed by children in their talk-in-interaction.

Findings – The function of threats – specifically in terms of the outcome of children's disputes – cannot be classified by the content of the inducement. ‘You can’t come to my birthday party’, for example, is commonly heard in young children's discourse, but this threat is implicated in both the resolution and dissipation (abandonment) of dispute episodes. Accordingly, the meaning and analysability of threats is explored with respect to their relative value and their practical rationality.

Research limitations – This small data set presents the opportunity for the phenomena of children's threats to studied further in a larger collection.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter makes a unique contribution to the study of language and social interaction by illustrating young children's competent use of conditional threats in the closings of peer disputes.

The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8‐9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk‐in‐interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child‐adult”, the “adult‐child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how preschoolers with different language backgrounds accomplish everyday interaction at a Swedish preschool, where the lingua franca (common language) is Swedish. More specifically, it aims to analyze how the target children, despite their limited language resources in Swedish, use their existing communicative resources to make friends and achieve intersubjectivity in front of two alphabet charts illustrating the Arabic and Latin alphabets, respectively.

The data are drawn from a single play episode between three boys and a girl, aged four years. Their interaction was video-recorded, and the analytical framework of the study is influenced by ethnomethodological work on social action focusing particularly on participants’ methodical ways of accomplishing and making sense of social activities.

The analyses show that the children’s trajectory of achieving intersubjectivity was partly bothersome as their interpretation of the alphabet charts diverged, due to their different language knowledge and earlier experiences. Hence, to attain joint understanding and intersubjectivity, they used a range of communicative resources: besides speaking Swedish they used word mixing, attention-getters (“look” and “check it out”), and nonverbal moves such as pointing, gesturing, intone, and screaming. It is notable that, despite some problems in understanding, their desire to make friends and have fun together seemed to compensate for their joint failure to always understand each other.

Detailed analyses and observations of how children with diverse language backgrounds use their communicative resources to achieve intersubjectivity and make friends can be useful for preschool teachers’ understanding of how they can further support the children’s socialization and capturing of the majority language – here Swedish.

The present chapter contributes to a wider understanding of how second-language learning is a complex trajectory edged with both setbacks and successes, especially when all the children interacting have diverse language backgrounds and experiences. However, the analysis highlights how, in their endeavor to make friends, the children find ways to solve problems in situ in their own way, and enjoy each other’s company despite the fragility of the play and their language shortcomings.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of considering both fidelity and adaptation in assessing the implementation of evidence‐based programs.

The current study employs a multi‐method strategy to understand two dimensions of implementation (fidelity and adaptation) in the Strong African American Families (SAAF) program. Data were video recordings of program delivery and pre‐test and post‐test interviews from the efficacy trial. Multilevel regression in Mplus was used to assess the impact of fidelity to the manual, coded by independent observers, on racial socialization outcomes. One activity on racial socialization, a core component of the program, was selected for an in‐depth examination using conversation analysis (a qualitative method of analyzing talk in interactions).

Results of the quantitative analyses demonstrated that fidelity of the selected activity was associated with increases in parent's use of racial socialization from pre‐test to post‐test, but only when participant attendance was included in the model. Results of the qualitative analyses demonstrated that facilitators were making adaptations to the session and that these adaptations appeared to be in line with cultural competence.

The development of quantitative fidelity measures can be problematic, with many decision points to consider. The current study contributes to the evidence base to develop a quantitative measure of adaptation for family‐based parenting programs.

Many researchers examining implementation of evidence‐based programs consider fidelity and adaptation to be polar ends of a single spectrum. This paper provides evidence for the importance of examining each independently.