Advice giving in telephone interactions between mothers and their young adult daughters

This thesis focuses on the social organisation of advice, as it unfolds in interactions between mothers and their young adult daughters on the telephone. The analysis is based on a corpus of 51 telephone calls from 5 different families. Advice giving is studied here using the methods of conversation analysis and discursive psychology. The main interest has been to consider the dimensions that are relevant to the potentially tricky action of advice giving, building on the dimensions of normativity and knowledge asymmetry that have already been identified in the literature. The less strictly institutionalised context studied here provides a relatively new arena for considering the array of issues that are relevant to advice giving. Indeed, this has provided a broad scope for specifying how recipiency is brought off in advice giving sequences and how the position of advice recipient is managed. The analysis begins by considering the different forms of advice that were found in the data and their affordances in terms of the recipient s next turn. Contingency is identified as an important dimension in advice giving and a range of resources are identified which build contingency into the advice in various ways and which provide the recipient with different degrees of optionality when responding to advice. The thesis then goes on to consider how recipients respond to advice and the sorts of issues that make relevant one response type over another. The analysis identifies the importance of affiliation and alignment when considering different types of advice response. Furthermore, it is shown that morality, activity type, and alignment to the recipient s position, are important features of why a particular response type is chosen over another. The final analytic chapter then considers how the potentially tricky action of advice giving is made relevant in the first place. It is shown that the choice between different forms of advice is related to local issues of entitlement and contingency. In considering these different components to advice giving, the analysis explicates an array of important issues in advice giving sequences including: knowledge asymmetry, normativity, entitlement, contingency, affiliation, alignment and morality as well as considering evidence to suggest that advice is a dispreferred action. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for studying advice and promoting advice acceptance, as well as considering how we can begin to see relationality being constituted.