Jenkins_2015-Sociology_of_Health_&_Illness.pdf (125.43 kB)
Negotiating pain: the joint construction of a child's bodily sensation
Traditional theories of socialisation, in which the child was viewed as a passive
subject of external influences, are increasingly being rejected in favour of a new
sociology of childhood which frames the child as a social actor. This article
demonstrates the way in which conversation analysis can reveal children’s agency
in the micro-detail of naturally occurring episodes in which children express bodily
sensations and pain in everyday life. Based on 71 video-recordings of mealtimes
with five families, each with two children under 10 years old, the analysis focuses
on the components of children’s expressions of bodily sensation (including pain),
the character of parents’ responses and the nature of the subsequent talk. The
findings provide further evidence that children are social actors, active in
constructing, accepting and resisting the nature of their physical experience and
pain. A conversation analysis of ordinary family talk facilitates a description of
how a child’s agency is built, maintained or resisted through the interactional
practices participants employ to display knowledge.
Funding
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant no. ES/ F020864/1, 2007).
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Sociology of Health & IllnessVolume
37Issue
2Pages
298 - 311Citation
JENKINS, L., 2015. Negotiating pain: the joint construction of a child's bodily sensation. Sociology of Health & Illness, 37(2), pp. 298 - 311.Publisher
©2015 The Author. Sociology of Health & Illness©2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness/John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Publication date
2015Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Wiley under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ISSN
0141-9889Publisher version
Language
- en