The collaborative development of power in children's arguments.

• Author: Meyer, Jasna
• Position: Special Issue: Interpersonal Argument

INTRODUCTION

Early in life children are taught the importance of cooperating and sharing, but it is through arguing that they are able to display power and status, which is an integral process in their social world. Within peer groups, children create their own social system and learn to deal with incompatible goals. They develop communicative strategies for exerting social control. Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson (1967) claim that both complimentary (unequal status) and symmetrical (equal status) interchanges serve important functions in relationships. They stress that being dominant (one-up) or submissive (one-down) is not in itself a positive or negative circumstance. Children need to learn to cope with both roles, just as adults must. Studying children's arguments provides a way of analyzing these dynamics of preschoolers' social relationships. This essay is an exploration of the strategies children use in arguments to establish power and dominance.

A review of the literature indicates that children's arguments have received attention by several researchers who have primarily focused on the nature (Eisenberg & Garvey, 1981; O'Keefe & Benoit, 1982), structure (Brenneis & Lein, 1977), emergence (Maynard, 1985a) and resolution (Benoit, 1981) of argumentative interactions. In general, these studies have found that a generic characteristic of children's arguments is overt opposition, which can take a variety of forms (e.g., assertion, denial, insult, etc). Dispute sequences are cooperative endeavors that are collaboratively developed by interactants as the argument unfolds. Argumentative sequences are structured in one of three basic patterns: repetition in which statements repeat one another, escalation in which successive statements are stronger, longer or more imaginative, and inversion in which successive statements contradict the previous statement. Arguments are regulated by rules, which are utilized to assign winner or loser status to interactants.

While this literature has produced a basic groundwork for understanding children's arguments, few researchers have focused on the important aspect of power in these interactions. Social conflict, peer status, and the dominance relations of children have been widely studied (Ladd, Price, & Hart, 1988; LaFreniere & Charlesworth, 1987; Maynard, 1985b; Vespo & O'Connor, 1989; Williams & Schaller, 1990), but, as noted, we still know little about how preschoolers establish power moment-by-moment (or turn by turn) in argumentative episodes. A few researchers, though, have provided analysis of how children express control and power in conflict interactions.

Benoit (1983) has focused on the use of threats in children's discourse. She contends that threats are conversational units that express control with the intention of hurting or punishing the hearer. Analyses of types of threats indicate a preference for expressing harm or intending to withhold an object or action from the partner. The interactant was found most frequently to respond to the threat with a rejection, thereby countering the speaker's attempt to control.

Mitchell-Kernan and Kernan (1977) and Wood and Gardner (1980) investigated children's use of directives to achieve power in interactions. Directives and reactions to them can be used "to define, reaffirm, challenge, manipulate, and redefine status and rank" (Mitchell-Kernan & Kernan, 1977, p.201). Dominant children are most successful in gaining compliance and submissive children use more politeness cues than their partners (Wood & Gardner, 1980).

Further, Streeck (1986) and Goodwin (1982) have offered microanalyses of how school-aged children collaborate in performing highly orderly negotiations of power, status, and rank during dispute episodes. However, preschoolers' development of power has not been investigated and deserves examination. The ability to collaboratively develop power is an essential part of communicative competence that begins early in childhood. Therefore, from a developmental perspective studies need to focus on how preschoolers learn to negotiate power with their peers. In this report I attempt to expand upon our knowledge of argumentation by examining the strategies that preschoolers use in arguments to display power.

Power can be thought of as a dynamic product of shifting relationships (Hocker & Wilmot, 1991). An individual does not have power--it is given to him/her by the others with whom he/she transacts. As Hocker and Wilmot (1985, p.134) explain, "All power in interpersonal relationships is a property of the social relationship rather than a quality of the individual." Power accrues to an interactant through cooperation of another who willingly or unwillingly accommodates (Lund & Duchan, 1988). Millar and Millar (1977) have distinguished between domineeringness and dominance. Domineeringness refers to an individual's one-up behavior whose purpose is conversational control. However, only when it is responded to with a one-down response by the other does dominance result. Dominance can only occur when the other cooperates with our definition of the relationship at that particular time; this negotiation between interactants is the focus of the present paper. Therefore, when an individual accepts the one-down position, it allows the other to be one-up and to display dominance, producing differing levels of status in the hierarchy.

Lastly, control has been defined as the exertion of power, influence, and regulation on the behavior of another (Stang & Wrightsman, 1981). Although there have been distinctions in the literature concerning power, dominance, and control, for my purposes these terms will be used as synonyms.

METHOD

Data Analysis

The methodological framework for the study is a blend of discourse analysis (Brown & Yule, 1983) and a form of interaction analysis labelled "micro-ethnography" (Erickson & Schultz, 1982) or "the structural approach to the understanding of interaction" (Kendon, 1977). Discourse analytic techniques are adapted because they enable the researcher to examine the structure of social interaction manifested in conversion, i.e. to discover the connections between utterances and to describe what the talk is doing from a sociolinguistic framework. Micro-ethnography is also utilized because it can account for the ways in which behaviors are organized and "how they function in the creation of interactional events" (Kendon, 1977, p.40). Examining the episode moment-by-moment is important because this is where local social order is accomplished.

Subjects and Procedure

The subjects were four previously acquainted preschoolers, Ryan (aged 3), Nathan (aged 3), Stuart (aged 4), and Ann (aged 3), who were enrolled in a private child care center in a city in the midwest. They were taken from the play area by their teacher to a meeting room for videotaping, which was optimal for isolating a small group of interactants. The children were allowed to bring whatever toys they wished to play with--the boys brought wooden blocks and cylinders, along with several plastic toy animals; the girl brought a doll and a blanket.

The children engaged in free play for 30 minutes and were aware of the videocamera, but grew accustomed to it and appeared not to be influenced by its presence. An exception occurred when Ryan asked if he could "look through it and take some pictures." The naturalistic context was used to capture the richness and complexity of children's discourse, as opposed to utilizing simulations such as role plays.

Tape Transcription

For purposes of clarity, an argument has been defined as the interaction which grows out of an overt opposition to a request, assertion, or action. This criterion was used to isolate the four arguments on the videotape. Each sequence was transcribed and included verbal and nonverbal information. The transcript of each episode will be presented before its analysis. Normal orthographic conventions were followed in the transcripts, with a few exceptions. Contextual information (nonverbal aspects of the interactions) was transcribed by descriptive statements contained within double parentheses, and overlapping talk was connected by brackets. Suprasegmental features were also transcribed. Volume was coded on a continuum from very soft to very loud utterances, in which loud utterances were capitalized and soft marked with the descriptive word. Stress was coded as an element when it was used to emphasize particular words or utterances, and this was indicated with italics.

ANALYSIS

I will begin with some general observations, and then present a detailed examination of each conflict, including its emergence and termination. A way of understanding the strategies preschoolers use to establish power is...