How a 'good parent' decides on childhood vaccination. Demonstrating independence and deliberation during Dutch healthcare visits.

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.

'One size doesn't fit all': Lessons from interaction analysis on tailoring Open Science practices to qualitative research.

The Open Science Movement aims to enhance the soundness, transparency, and accessibility of scientific research, and at the same time increase public trust in science. Currently, Open Science practices are mainly presented as solutions to the 'reproducibility crisis' in hypothetico-deductive quantitative research. Increasing interest has been shown towards exploring how these practices can be adopted by qualitative researchers. In reviewing this emerging body of work, we conclude that the issue of diversity within qualitative research has not been adequately addressed. Furthermore, we find that many of these endeavours start with existing solutions for which they are trying to find matching problems to be solved. We contrast this approach with a natural incorporation of Open Science practices within interaction analysis and its constituent research traditions: conversation analysis, discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, and membership categorisation analysis. Zooming in on the development of conversation analysis starting in the 1960s, we highlight how practices for opening up and sharing data and analytic thinking have been embedded into its methodology. On the basis of this presentation, we propose a series of lessons learned for adopting Open Science practices in qualitative research.

To like or not to like: Negotiating food assessments of children from families with a low socioeconomic position.

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.

Vocabularies of social influence: Managing the moral accountability of influencing another.

While there are many definitions and conceptual accounts of 'persuasion' and other forms of social influence, social scientists lack empirical insight into how and when people actually use terms like 'persuade', 'convince', 'change somebody's mind' - what we call the vocabularies of social influence - in actual social interaction. We collected instances of the spontaneous use of these and other social influence terms (such as 'schmoozing' and 'hoodwinking') in face-to-face and telephone conversations across multiple domestic and institutional settings. The recorded data were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology and conversation analysis with a focus on the actions accomplished in and through the use of social influence terms. We found that when speakers use 'persuading' - but not 'convincing' or 'changing somebody's mind' - it is in the service of orienting to the moral accountability of influencing others. The specificity with which social actors deploy these terms demonstrates the continued importance of developing our understandings of the meaning of words - especially psychological ones - via their vernacular use by ordinary people in the first instance, rather than have psychologists reify, operationalize, and build an architecture for social psychology without paying attention to what people actually do with the 'psychological thesaurus'.

Who theorizes age? The "socio-demographic variables" device and age-period-cohort analysis in the rhetoric of survey research.

In this paper we argue that quantitative survey-based social research essentializes age, through specific rhetorical tools. We outline the device of 'socio-demographic variables' and we discuss its argumentative functions, looking at scientific survey-based analyses of adult scientific literacy, in the Public Understanding of Science research field. 'Socio-demographics' are virtually omnipresent in survey literature: they are, as a rule, used and discussed as bundles of independent variables, requiring little, if any, theoretical and measurement attention. 'Socio-demographics' are rhetorically effective through their common-sense richness of meaning and inferential power. We identify their main argumentation functions as 'structure building', 'pacification', and 'purification'. Socio-demographics are used to uphold causal vocabularies, supporting the transmutation of the descriptive statistical jargon of 'effects' and 'explained variance' into 'explanatory factors'. Age can also be studied statistically as a main variable of interest, through the age-period-cohort (APC) disambiguation technique. While this approach has generated interesting findings, it did not mitigate the reductionism that appears when treating age as a socio-demographic variable. By working with age as a 'socio-demographic variable', quantitative researchers convert it (inadvertently) into a quasi-biological feature, symmetrical, as regards analytical treatment, with pathogens in epidemiological research.

Enhancing the authenticity of assessments through grounding in first impressions.

This article examines first impressions through a discursive and interactional lens. Until now, social psychologists have studied first impressions in laboratory conditions, in isolation from their natural environment, thus overseeing their discursive roles as devices for managing situated interactional concerns. I examine fragments of text and talk in which individuals spontaneously invoke first impressions of other persons as part of assessment activities in settings where the authenticity of speakers' stances might be threatened: (1) in activities with inbuilt evaluative components and (2) in sequential contexts where recipients have been withholding affiliation to speakers' actions. I discuss the relationship between authenticity, as a type of credibility issue related to intersubjective trouble, and the characteristics of first impression assessments, which render them useful for dealing with this specific credibility concern. I identify four features of first impression assessments which make them effective in enhancing authenticity: witness positioning (Potter, 1996, Representing reality: Discourse, rhetoric and social construction, Sage, London), (dis)location in time and space, automaticity, and extreme formulations (Edwards, 2003, Analyzing race talk: Multidisciplinary perspectives on the research interview, Cambridge University Press, New York).