Mother–Infant Interactions in the Lab Setting: Collaborative Participation Frameworks and Task Orientation

The study discussed in this article aimed to understand how pre-activity formulations are designed and accomplished by mothers in play interactions as everyday interactional business. Here, we report specifically on instances during lab-based interactions where the mother orients to the lab-based task of singing with their infant, and discuss the potential implications of such participant orientation on the type of data collected. Multimodal conversation analysis was used to transcribe and analyze the video-recorded sequences of interaction between the mother–infant dyad, where the findings demonstrated how: (a) participation frameworks to perform the requested lab task were initiated by the mother, as she (b) positioned the infant as a competent interlocutor in the co-production of these participation frameworks when performing the lab-based task. As such, this article provides recommendations for subsequent research regarding choices on context concerning lab-based or real-world settings that are familiar to the participants for data collection. It is argued that both types of data collection are valuable for the study of children's interactions using conversation analysis and for studying children more broadly, but that researchers should be explicit about the impacts on data collected due to these different research contexts when authoring publications about their studies.