Accounting for Friendship: Moral Ordering and Category Membership in Preadolescent Girls' Relational Talk

Abstract

In this article, I explore how preadolescent girls, with low-income and multiethnic backgrounds, negotiate social and moral norms of conduct and accomplish the local social organization of the group over time. The girls were audio recorded as part of fieldwork in an elementary school in Sweden. The analysis combines conversation analytic examination of talk-in-interaction and ethnomethodological concerns for members' understanding of social categories. As demonstrated, the girls deploy diverse forms of collaborative judgmental work (complaints, accounts, membership categorization work, etc.) to describe coparticipants as good versus bad friends. Resistance (denials, justifications, recycling, substitutions, counteraccusations) to category ascriptions solidified negative category membership (of a bad friend) and eventually cast a girl as friendless. The detailed analysis demonstrates that the girls provide their own rendering of the seemingly neutral (and romanticized) activity of relational talk, thereby transforming it into an activity for indexing inappropriate behaviors, strengthening social relations of power, and justifying social exclusion.

Notes

1 All names of the girls in the multiethnic peer group have been changed and replaced with fictional names, which have ethnic flavor.

2 The sequential unfolding of the account episode is in line with CA research on how accounts are sequentially organized; how accounts become relevant as a response and what accounts make relevant about prior events (see Buttny, 1993, for a more developed discussion).