Compliance, resistance and incipient compliance when responding to directives

TLDR

The background concerns how children may avoid or feign compliance with directives. The study investigates how parents can elicit compliance from children by analyzing conversational responses to directives and focusing on an embodied alternative response. The authors use conversation analysis to examine an embodied display of incipient compliance—preparatory actions that signal forthcoming compliance and allow a verbal turn to reframe the action as autonomous. Incipient compliance lets the child maintain autonomy while avoiding conflict or repeated directives.

Abstract

How does a parent get a child to do something? And, indeed, how might the child avoid complying or seem to comply without actually having done so? This article uses conversation analysis to identify the interactionally preferred and dispreferred response to directives (compliance and resistance respectively). It then focuses on one alternative response option that has both verbal and embodied elements. The first part involves an embodied display of incipient compliance. That is, actions that are preparatory steps towards compliance and signal that it may be forthcoming, but which do not in themselves constitute compliance. Incipient compliance creates sequential space for a verbal turn that reformulates the ongoing action as autonomous, self-motivated behaviour on the recipient’s part, rather than subject to the will of the directive speaker. This enables the recipient to maintain autonomy over their own conduct without provoking the conflict or repeat directives associated with outright resistance.