Managing the Moral Implications of Advice in Informal Interaction

Abstract

What does advice giving look like among family members? Most conversation analytic research on advice has been in institutional settings, which constrain what speakers can do. Here we analyze advice in the apparently freer environment of telephone calls between mothers and their young adult daughters. We concentrate on how the advice is received. Our analysis shows that the position of “advice recipient” is a potentially unwelcome identity to occupy because it implies one knows less than the advice giver and indeed that one may be somehow at fault. Advice can be resisted, but choosing to do so seems to depend on what the interactional costs would be. We discuss the implications for studying advice and promoting advice acceptance as well as the way relationality more generally can be constituted in talk.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the mothers and daughters who very kindly agreed to take part in the study. We are particularly indebted to Jonathan Potter, Charles Antaki, and Anna Lindström for their invaluable suggestions and insight and to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed engagement with the article. The article is all the better for it. It has also benefited from discussions at the 2nd annual LANSI meeting in September 2012. We are also very thankful to the members of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at Loughborough for their wisdom, critique, and support.

Notes

¹Here we see how laughter has the function of managing the sequence so that it is brought off in a less problematic way (see Potter & Hepburn, 2010, and Shaw, Hepburn, & Potter, 2013).