Peer-reviewed article
Participation practices in mother-child interactions: longitudinal case studies
Stefan Pfänder, Elke Schumann, Philipp Freyburger, Heike Behrens, Anna Buchheim ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed study uses Conversational Analysis to examine how mothers and children interact during play across four years, from age 1 to age 5. The research tracks how children develop active participation skills and how mothers support them in joint activities. The study investigates whether participation patterns that emerge in infancy become established routines by age 5, and explores the role of synchronized physical movement in supporting children's active involvement.
Key points
- The study uses longitudinal data comparing mother-child play interactions at two time points: age 1 and age 5
- Research focuses on how children perform their own active role as participants in joint activities
- The study examines whether early participation patterns become entrenched over time
- Embodied action synchronization between mother and child is investigated as a key resource for participation
- Participation in joint activities is described as a universal form of human social development
Limitations
The document is an abstract and does not provide information on sample size, specific findings, effect sizes, or whether the study identified differences between children or contexts. The actual results and conclusions are not presented in this metadata extract.
Abstract
Abstract In recent years, Conversational Analysis (CA) has seen an increasing interest in longitudinal studies (Deppermann & Pekarek Doehler, 2021). The recurrent experience of interactional practices leads interactants to develop routines that may sediment into entrenched patterns over time (Dreyer, 2022). Longitudinal CA thus aims to track the emergence and sedimentation of interactional practices over time. In this contribution, we analyse interactional practices of participation in play-situations. Participation in joint activities is a universal form of human sociality (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2005). Here, we focus on how children perform their own agentive participant’s work and how mothers support their children in doing so. Investigating a longitudinal data set of mother-child play-interactions at ages 1 and 5, we ask whether participation patterns emerge as early as in the first year and are sedimented in the fifth year, as well as whether the synchronisation of embodied action provides crucial resources for the achievement of active participation in joint activities.