UCLA

Childhood is generally conceptualized as a social construct in contemporary research within the social sciences — while the immaturity of children is a biological fact, how such immaturity in this particular period of human life is perceived and made sense of is a structural and cultural component of a society. However, little research has empirically examined precisely how this social construction is accomplished on a moment-by-moment basis in everyday life. Taking a conversation analytic approach, this dissertation investigates how childhood is constructed in the turn-by-turn sequential unfolding of everyday interaction. In modern society, childhood is predominately viewed as a time of innocence, during which children are seen as having limited rights to autonomy. Previous interactional studies also suggest that children’s membership status is characterized by their limited rights to participate in interaction. In this dissertation, I draw on naturally occurring adult-child conversational data in English and Mandarin and examine the rights, obligations, and accountability associated with the status of being a child participant in interaction. Chapter 2 shows that adults constantly attend to children’s performances in question-answer sequences and work to safeguard their rights to respond, thereby validating their status as interaction participants. Chapter 3 documents how parents assert epistemic primacy over their children, thereby treating them as having reduced rights to make claims about their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Grounded in this asymmetrical relationship between children and their parents, Chapter 4 illustrates that third-party interlocutors (e.g., relatives, friends, and other children) also orient to such asymmetry. That is, the construction of the asymmetrical parent-child relationship is a collaborative effort involving children, parents, and other interlocutors. It is through these special orientations to children that their status as children is constructed in social interaction. By demonstrating how the relative rights of children and adults are manifested in the details of naturally occurring interaction, this dissertation formulates the interactional construction of childhood, which can be related to a wide set of interests in children, including social psychology, child development, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics, and makes important contributions to the insights of childhood in the social sciences more generally.