Hur barn gör måltid

Sammanfattning: This dissertation focuses on interaction patterns between preschool children when doing mealtime in a preschool environment, analyzing how social order is displayed and constituted among 3 – to 6-year-olds. The analyses draw on a video ethnography with 15 hours of video recordings (30 mealtime events). An overall issue concerns how the participants position themselves as social actors in face-to-face conversations, and more specifi-cally how the children themselves collaborate in making sense out of their daily lives within their peer groups.Theoretically, the thesis builds on social practice theories, including so-cial constructivist perspectives, work on positionings and studies of language socialization (Ochs, 1996; Ochs, Pontecorvo & Fasulo, 1996; Ochs & Shohet, 2006). The findings show how children when eating together in their peer groups during mealtime participate and act on their own in the creation of mealtime rules and a local social interaction order (Goffman, 1983) and how the children direct each other and create and recreate a local mealtime order.