Discursive psychology & conversation analysis by Hedwig te Molder
Sociology of Health and Illness, 2023
Childhood vaccination consultations are considered an important phase in parents’ decision-making... more Childhood vaccination consultations are considered an important phase in parents’ decision-making process. To date, only a few empirical studies conducted in the United States have investigated real-life consultations. To address this gap, we recorded Dutch vaccination conversations between healthcare providers and parents during routine health consultations for their newborns. The data were analysed using Conversation Analysis and Discursive Psychology. We found that the topic of vaccination was often initiated with ‘Have you already thought about vaccination?’ (HYATAV), and that this formulation was consequential for parental identity work. Exploring the interactional trajectories engendered by this initiation format we show that: (1) interlocutors treat the question as consisting of two types of queries, (2) conversational trajectories differ according to which of the queries is attended to and that (3) parents work up a ‘good parent’ identity in response to HYATAV, by demonstrating that they think about their child’s vaccination beforehand and make their decisions independently. Our findings shed new light on the interactional unfolding of parental vaccination decisions.
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SSM - Qualitative Research in Health
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Appetite, 2022
The present study explored how primary school-aged children from families with a low socioeconomi... more The present study explored how primary school-aged children from families with a low socioeconomic position produce 'likes' and 'dislikes' of foods during everyday family meals, and how these (dis)likes are understood and treated by their parents. It is crucial to understand how food preferences develop in the course of everyday life, as it is known that there are socioeconomic disparities in food preference and consumption, and that children from families with a low socioeconomic position have relatively poorer diets. Deploying an interactional approach to food preference, video recordings of 79 evening meals in families with a low socioeconomic position were analyzed using discursive psychology and conversation analysis. The analysis highlighted that children's food likes and dislikes were treated differently by their parents. While likes were routinely not responded to, agreed with or further elaborated, dislikes were predominantly oriented to as food refusals or treated as inappropriate, or non-genuine claims. Children's food assessments, i.e., likes and dislikes, were often disattended by parents when they appeared to be food preference displays. By contrast, assessments that accomplished social actions like refusals and complaints were more often responded to. The analysis also revealed the importance of distinguishing between assessments about food items in general, that were not currently being eaten, and assessments of food eaten here-and-now. All in all, the study evidences that and how assessment sequences open up interactional spaces where children and parents orient to and negotiate relative rights and responsibilities to know, to assess and to accomplish specific actions. Implications for food preference research are discussed.
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Pragmatics and Society, 2021
This paper examines public meetings in the Netherlands where experts and officials interact with ... more This paper examines public meetings in the Netherlands where experts and officials interact with local residents on the human health effects of livestock farming. Using Conversation Analysis, we reveal a ‘weapon of the weak’: a practice by which the residents resist experts’ head start in information meetings. It is shown how residents draw on the given question-answer format to challenge experts and pursue an admission of, for example, methodological shortcomings. We show how the residents’ first question functions as a ‘foot-in-the-door’, providing them with a strong basis for skepticism. By systematically challenging the expert responses, the residents exploit the interaction’s sequential organization, with the effect that the goal becomes them being convinced rather than being informed. Consequently, the withholding of consent becomes the residents’ ‘weapon’. Finally, we argue that in an age where expertise is increasingly contested, it is crucial to understand how, and to what ...
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Discursive psychology & conversation analysis by Hedwig te Molder
Papers by Hedwig te Molder