Sticky Categories, Discursive Practices, and the Potential for Change: The Case of Children's Food "Likes".

Language can be considered as not simply playing a role in behavior change but as being foundational to how we understand people's behavior in itself. Focusing on the use of discursive categories in everyday social interaction, this paper examines how dispositional categories (such as food "likes")...

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Publicado en:Journal of Language & Social Psychology Vol. 44; no. 3/4; pp. 319 - 343
Autor principal: Wiggins, Sally
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Sage Publications Inc. Jun-Sep2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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      dt: Jun-Sep2025
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        atl: Sticky Categories, Discursive Practices, and the Potential for Change: The Case of Children's Food "Likes".
      aug:
        au: Wiggins, Sally
        affil: 4566 Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
      su:
        Discursive practices
        Categorization (Psychology)
        Behavior modification
        Social interaction
        Dietary patterns
        Verbal behavior
        Child nutrition
        Food preferences
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        subj:
          Discursive practices
          Categorization (Psychology)
          Behavior modification
          Social interaction
          Dietary patterns
          Verbal behavior
          Child nutrition
          Food preferences
      keyword:
        behavior change
        categories
        children
        discursive psychology
        eating
        food likes
        language
        mealtimes
      ab: Language can be considered as not simply playing a role in behavior change but as being foundational to how we understand people's behavior in itself. Focusing on the use of discursive categories in everyday social interaction, this paper examines how dispositional categories (such as food "likes") become "sticky" through being invoked during one social action but treated as relatively stable over time and used to account for past and future behavior. Data are video recordings of children's eating practices taken from two large corpuses of family meals in Scotland and preschool lunches in Sweden. Discursive Psychology was used to explicate the ways in which categories of food likes and dislikes are implicated in social actions during mealtimes, such as offering food, encouraging children to eat, or responding to food already eaten. The analysis unpacks the central argument in three parts: (1) that discursive practices construct psychological categories, (2) that categories are embedded within social actions, and (3) that social actions may change, but the categories stick. The paper contributes to discursive and interactional work on the use of categories through shifting the analytical gaze to dispositional categories and examining mundane (as well as institutional) settings. The implications of this work extend to a much broader field of research on language and behavior change through illustrating the embedded resistance of certain discursive categories and their consequences for the possibilities for change.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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          year: 2025
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