This research shows the way in which the concepts of 'taste' and 'liking' are deployed in everyday family mealtime conversations in families with a lower socioeconomic position. The analytic focus is on how primary school-aged children produce (dis)likes of food and how these are understood and treated by their parents.
Research on mealtimes often focuses on prompts by parents rather than by children. One of the few things known about children's initiatives to display (dis)liking of food, is that they most frequently make claims about their own 'don't likes' rather than making claims about what they like. However, these 'don't likes' are routinely countered or ignored by parents. To date, there is little insight into children's liking strategies and how they are responded to. In addition, most studies on mealtime conversations are conducted in middle class families. Interactions and practices specifically in families with a lower socioeconomic position (SEP) are relatively unknown. Children of families with a lower SEP consume poorer diets than children from higher social classes. For both theoretical and practical purposes, it is therefore desirable to gain more insight in child-parent mealtime interactions in low SEP families. Applying conversation analysis and discursive psychology, our research reports on how children's food assessments were understood and treated by parents in various designs and contexts, based on our data corpus of 79 mealtime conversations in low SEP families.
