"She was twenty-five and I was twelve and she learnt really fast": a discursive approach to age as social action in talk

Abstract

Age is an important social identity. Previous research has established that age categories are associated with beliefs and expectations for what a person can be, should be, or wants to be doing. In this thesis, age is approached as a construct produced in and through talk-in-interaction which is used in varied and sometimes contradictory ways to accomplish social action. The aim of this thesis is to examine spontaneously occurring references to age and stage of life in talk. Data was sourced from a pre-existing corpus of audio recordings (the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English) and video recordings, which were collected by the researcher. All data consisted of informal, naturally occurring, mundane conversation; arguably the primordial site of social interaction. Sequences of talk in which age was demonstrably relevant were selected for analysis. Within these sequences, age terms were found to be mobilised for the construction of the life course as normal and factual. Non-normative accounts of the life course were presented as tellable or unusual, thus reinforcing normative life course progress. A second function of age that was observed was the mobilisation of age terms for the conversational action of referring to persons. It was found that age and stage of life were often used to describe a person that the recipients did not know. Alongside these functions, the selection of particular age and stage of life terms were found to contribute to speakers' ongoing social actions. With these functions in mind, five case studies were analysed in which age was oriented to as related to sexual activities, sexual maturity, and sexualised appearance. Age and gender were found to regularly co-occur in descriptions of persons, indicating their integral role in identity. The findings contribute to the endeavour of qualitative age research. The analyses identified a rich array of age related themes, demonstrating that a conversation analytic approach to be a fruitful for future qualitative age research.