Articles

Getting, receiving and holding attention: How adolescents' telling initiatives work out in interaction with professional parents in family homes

Authors

  • Ellen Schep Christian University of Applied Sciences, Ede
  • Tom Koole University of Groningen
  • Martine Noordegraaf Christian University of Applied Sciences, Ede

Keywords:

family homes, adolescents, professional parents, telling initiations, affective relationship

Abstract

This paper examines various ways in which adolescents during dinner table settings gain attention to start a telling varying from just a comment to storytelling. The settings are in family homes where professional parents run a household consisting of their biological children combined with a number of children and adolescents who are placed in that household for several years. Affective interaction between adolescents and their professional parents is important for the development of these youths. The method of Conversation Analysis has been used to analyse video data of dinner conversations in six households. These home situations were recorded by having cameras run every day from 4 pm to 7 pm over a period of three weeks. The telling initiations of the adolescents include verbal and embodied practices such as eye-gaze and body-movement in order to start a telling. The different kinds of initiations seem to produce different kinds of sequential responses from the professional parents. The analysis of the telling initiations by adolescents and the room they are given for these tellings is a contribution to the still limited knowledge about building and maintaining affective relationships between professional parents and adolescents in family home environments.

Author Biographies

Ellen Schep, Christian University of Applied Sciences, Ede

Christian University of Applied Sciences, Ede, the Netherlands.

Tom Koole, University of Groningen

University of Groningen, Communication and information science, Groningen, the Netherlands.

Martine Noordegraaf, Christian University of Applied Sciences, Ede

Christian University of Applied Sciences, Ede, the Netherlands.

Published

2016-12-01

Issue

Section

Articles