Wiggin
Biographic Data
| ID | 6059 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wiggin |
| FAMILY NAME | Wiggin |
| SIGNATURE | WIGGIN |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Strathclyde |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3307-0748 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 291 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
When Eating Becomes Collaborative: Co-Eating Examples from Children’s Mealtimes
As one of the most basic forms of sociality, eating together (or “commensality”) has been extensively researched across the social sciences. Interactional research, for instance, has demonstrated how commensality is collaboratively produced within and through moments of participation during shared mealtimes. In this article, I propose that there is a unique form of participation—“co-eating”—in which one person’s eating practices becomes a collabo…
Discursive psychology and qualitative inquiry in psychology
How to do discursive psychology: A concise guide
For those who wish to learn how to ‘do’ Discursive Psychology (DP), there are book chapters and textbooks that provide detailed explanations. What is missing, however, is a concise hands-on guide to enable novices to quickly become familiar with the analytic stages of DP. This paper ad-dresses this need and illustrates the processes of how to conduct a DP analysis using a worked ex-ample from our own research. The paper differs from other ‘how to…
Disgust at the Table: The Sequential Location and Production of Young Children's Food Disgust Expressions in the Home and Preschool
Children's understanding of disgust has been investigated experimentally from an individual perspective, but little is known about their expressions of disgust in everyday settings. Disgust has also been associated with, but not directly examined within, food refusal during mealtimes. Using a discursive psychological analysis of food disgust expressions in the home and preschool, this article examines how disgust becomes interactionally relevant …
Response cries and syntax
Response cries have been described as ritualized acts in human communication that come off as visceral reactions to local events (Goffman, 1978). Despite evidence that they are implemented at specific interactional moments, such as pain expressions in response to doctor's elicitation (Heath 1989) or surprise tokens after news or stories (Wilkinson & Kitzinger 2006), research has yet to explore how they are organized in relation to syntax and inco…
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”) become “sticky” through being invoked during one social action but treated as relatively stable over time and used to account for past and future beha…
Interaction as the foundation for eating practices in shared mealtimes
How assisted eating becomes a caring practice in institutional settings: Embodied gestures and stages of assisted eating
Assisted eating is a basic caring practice and the means through which many individuals receive adequate nutrition. Research in this area has noted the challenges of helping others to eat while upholding their independence, though has yet to explicate how this caring practice is achieved in detail and across the lifespan. This paper provides an empirical analysis of assisted eating episodes in two different institutions, detailing the processes t…
Daring to taste: The organisation of children's tasting practices during preschool lunches
Tasting food is the first step toward diversifying eating habits, and studies with children have typically focused on their sensory education and willingness to try new foods. While very little is known about how children taste foods during everyday mealtimes, EMCA (ethnomethodological and conversation analytic) research on adult tasting in naturalistic settings has demonstrated regular organisational patterns. This paper brings these two researc…
Repetition for real-time coordination of action: Lexical and non-lexical vocalizations in collaborative time management
Repetition has often been argued to be a semiotic device that iconically signifies ‘more content’, such as intensity and plurality. However, through multimodal interaction analysis of materials in English, Estonian, and Swedish, this paper demonstrates how self-repetition is used to coordinate actions across participants and temporally organize the ongoing activity. The data are taken from infant mealtimes, pilates classes, dance training, boardg…
How infant food likes become established as knowledge: Parental food assessments during infant mealtimes in the home
Early infancy is a critical period for the development of food likes and dislikes, but very little is known about the role of the social context and parent-child interaction within this process, and even less about what happens in the home environment. The current paper addresses this issue by examining how and when parents utter food assessments about their infants' eating practices during mealtimes in the home, and the practices through which i…
Sounding others’ sensations in interaction
This study investigates the practice of “sounding for others,” wherein one person vocalizes to enact someone else’s putatively ongoing bodily sensation. We argue that it constitutes a collaborative way of performing sensorial experiences. Examples include producing cries with others’ strain or pain and parents sounding an mmm of gustatory pleasure on their infant’s behalf. Vocal sounds, their loudness, and duration are specifically deployed for i…
Parental lip-smacks during infant mealtimes: Multimodal features and social functions
The lip-smack is a communicative sound object that has received very little research attention, with most work examining their occurrence in nonhuman primate interaction. The current paper aims to dissect the social potential of lip-smacks in human interaction. The analysis examines a corpus of 391 lip-smack particles produced by English-speaking parents while feeding their infants. A multimodal interaction analysis details the main features: (1)…
Enacting Gustatory Pleasure on Behalf of Another: The Multimodal Coordination of Infant Tasting Practices
Tasting as a social practice can be enacted on behalf of others through precisely positioned nonlexical vocalizations as gustatory mmms. This paper uses multimodal interaction analysis to detail the coordination of parents and infants while starting to feed solid foods; data are from families in Scotland. The analysis focuses on the organization of parental mmms in relation to eye gaze, sequentiality, and the temporal coordination of hands, food,…
A brief commentary on discursive psychology and talking to others
This commentary provides a short reflection on the current status of discursive psychology in a fluctuating academic landscape. It focuses on three points: how discursive psychological research situates itself in relation to other research (both within and outside of psychology), how psychology itself can be respecified as a discipline (rather than only topic areas within psychology), and on the need for further development of methodological aspe…
Esplat: A new society for enhancing learning and teaching in Psychology
Producing infant food preferences during weaning: The role of language and gesture in parent-–child interaction
Stepping Back From Crisis Points: The Provision and Acknowledgment of Support in an Online Suicide Discussion Forum
Suicide is a global health concern, though little is known about the social practices that might support those who are contemplating suicide. Online forums provide a unique insight into the anonymous discussion of suicide, including sociocultural norms about suicide and the delicate management of online interaction. The analysis illustrates how forum threads function as case studies and enable members to gain support on numerous occasions. In thi…
Qualitative undergraduate project supervision in psychology: Current practices and support needs of supervisors across North East England and Scotland
The dissertation is a core component of a psychology undergraduate degree, though very little research has been conducted into supervision processes at undergraduate level. This study examined the accounts of supervisors of qualitative dissertations in order to identify current practices of supervision and possible resources that might support supervision. Seventeen supervisors from psychology departments in North East England and Scotland were i…
On the accountability of changing bodies: Using discursive psychology to examine embodied identities in different research settings
dentity is typically understood as something that individuals “have” or own, an essential part of one’s psychological state that guides how we behave and how we fit into society. By contrast, the d
Adult and child use of love, like, don’t like and hate during family mealtimes. Subjective category assessments as food preference talk
Criticizing the Critic: Comments on J ahoda's (2012) Critique of Discursive Social Psychology
J ahoda (2012) criticizes discursive social psychology ( DSP ) on several different grounds; specifically, he argues that DSP has opaque methodological procedures, is of questionable scientific merit, involves over‐interpretation of its data, and implicitly claims its findings to be universal rather than contextually specific. We challenge these criticisms by arguing that observational studies of the kind typical within DSP research have a perfec…
Finishing the family meal. The interactional organisation of satiety
Managing blame in NHS weight management treatment: Psychologizing weight and ‘obesity’
Weight management services in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are on the increase, partly due to rising rates of patients classified as ‘obese’. Those attending such services are held accountable, on some level, for their weight, although this issue is rarely addressed in clinical research in this area. By contrast, critical social research on ‘obesity’ considers blame a prominent issue though has yet to examine this in situ , in interacti…
Doing being 'on the edge: Managing the Dilemma of Being Authentically Suicidal in an Online Forum
Those who attempt suicide have often been described as 'crying for help', and there are implications if such cries are not taken seriously. This paper examines how users of an Internet forum for 'suicidal thoughts' work up their authenticity in their opening posts, and how these are responded to by fellow forum users. Data were taken from two Internet forums on suicide over a period of one month and were analysed using discursive psychology. The …
Talking With Your Mouth Full: Gustatory Mmms and the Embodiment of Pleasure
This article examines the expression of gustatory pleasure as an interactional and discursive construction. Psychological studies of food and eating typically focus on the individual consumer, with bodily experiences conceptualized as internal and private events. It is argued that this approach underestimates the role of discourse and the interactional nature of food consumption. The expression of pleasure is examined here as a constructed and ev…
Eating Your Words: Discursive Psychology and the Reconstruction of Eating Practices
Psychological research into eating practices has focused mainly on attitudes and behaviour towards food, and disorders of eating. Using experimental and questionnaire-based designs, these studies place an emphasis on individual consumption and cognitive appraisal, overlooking the interactive context in which food is eaten. The current article examines eating practices in a more naturalistic environment, using mealtime conversations tape-recorded …
Good for 'You: Generic and Individual Healthy Eating Advice in Family Mealtimes
Healthy eating is one of the main concerns for health organizations in the UK, and has been widely promoted in recent decades. Yet despite the amount of nutritional information available, levels of obesity, heart disease and other food-related diseases remain high. Existing research in this area often uses individual accounts of consumption to examine the reasons why people may not be eating 'healthily'. An alternative way to approach this issue …
Enacting Gustatory Pleasure on Behalf of Another: The Multimodal Coordination of Infant Tasting Practices
Tasting as a social practice can be enacted on behalf of others through precisely positioned nonlexical vocalizations as gustatory mmms. This paper uses multimodal interaction analysis to detail the coordination of parents and infants while starting to feed solid foods; data are from families in Scotland. The analysis focuses on the organization of parental mmms in relation to eye gaze, sequentiality, and the temporal coordination of hands, food,…
Doing being 'on the edge: Managing the Dilemma of Being Authentically Suicidal in an Online Forum
Those who attempt suicide have often been described as 'crying for help', and there are implications if such cries are not taken seriously. This paper examines how users of an Internet forum for 'suicidal thoughts' work up their authenticity in their opening posts, and how these are responded to by fellow forum users. Data were taken from two Internet forums on suicide over a period of one month and were analysed using discursive psychology. The …
Developments in discursive psychology
Discursive psychology is the broad title for a range of research done in different disciplinary contexts – communication, language, sociology and psychology. It moves the theoretical and analytic f
Living with a chronic illness: Chinese-Canadian and Euro-Canadian women with diabetes—Exploring factors that influence management
Talking about taste: Using a discursive psychological approach to examine challenges to food evaluations
Parental lip-smacks during infant mealtimes: Multimodal features and social functions
The lip-smack is a communicative sound object that has received very little research attention, with most work examining their occurrence in nonhuman primate interaction. The current paper aims to dissect the social potential of lip-smacks in human interaction. The analysis examines a corpus of 391 lip-smack particles produced by English-speaking parents while feeding their infants. A multimodal interaction analysis details the main features: (1)…
Construction and Action in Food Evaluation: Conversational Data
This study engages both social psychological research on "attitudes" and discursive work on "evaluative practices." Methodological constraints in both of these fields have resulted in a relative lack of attention to everyday interaction. By using conversational data, the current study extends discursive research and highlights the constructive and constructed nature of food evaluations. Family mealtimes were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed …
Adult and child use of love, like, don’t like and hate during family mealtimes. Subjective category assessments as food preference talk
Finishing the family meal. The interactional organisation of satiety
Sounding others’ sensations in interaction
This study investigates the practice of “sounding for others,” wherein one person vocalizes to enact someone else’s putatively ongoing bodily sensation. We argue that it constitutes a collaborative way of performing sensorial experiences. Examples include producing cries with others’ strain or pain and parents sounding an mmm of gustatory pleasure on their infant’s behalf. Vocal sounds, their loudness, and duration are specifically deployed for i…
How infant food likes become established as knowledge: Parental food assessments during infant mealtimes in the home
Early infancy is a critical period for the development of food likes and dislikes, but very little is known about the role of the social context and parent-child interaction within this process, and even less about what happens in the home environment. The current paper addresses this issue by examining how and when parents utter food assessments about their infants' eating practices during mealtimes in the home, and the practices through which i…
Managing blame in NHS weight management treatment: Psychologizing weight and ‘obesity’
Weight management services in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are on the increase, partly due to rising rates of patients classified as ‘obese’. Those attending such services are held accountable, on some level, for their weight, although this issue is rarely addressed in clinical research in this area. By contrast, critical social research on ‘obesity’ considers blame a prominent issue though has yet to examine this in situ , in interacti…
Repetition for real-time coordination of action: Lexical and non-lexical vocalizations in collaborative time management
Repetition has often been argued to be a semiotic device that iconically signifies ‘more content’, such as intensity and plurality. However, through multimodal interaction analysis of materials in English, Estonian, and Swedish, this paper demonstrates how self-repetition is used to coordinate actions across participants and temporally organize the ongoing activity. The data are taken from infant mealtimes, pilates classes, dance training, boardg…
Stepping Back From Crisis Points: The Provision and Acknowledgment of Support in an Online Suicide Discussion Forum
Suicide is a global health concern, though little is known about the social practices that might support those who are contemplating suicide. Online forums provide a unique insight into the anonymous discussion of suicide, including sociocultural norms about suicide and the delicate management of online interaction. The analysis illustrates how forum threads function as case studies and enable members to gain support on numerous occasions. In thi…
Size matters: Constructing accountable bodies in NSPCC helpline interaction
The focus on body size or weight has become an increasing source of concern in western society, yet few studies have looked at how people invoke body size in various settings, and the practices to which such talk might be related. Hence this study examines instances in everyday and institutional interaction in which body size is treated as a relevant concern for speakers. A discursive psychological approach is used to examine five extracts from t…
Daring to taste: The organisation of children's tasting practices during preschool lunches
Tasting food is the first step toward diversifying eating habits, and studies with children have typically focused on their sensory education and willingness to try new foods. While very little is known about how children taste foods during everyday mealtimes, EMCA (ethnomethodological and conversation analytic) research on adult tasting in naturalistic settings has demonstrated regular organisational patterns. This paper brings these two researc…
Qualitative undergraduate project supervision in psychology: Current practices and support needs of supervisors across North East England and Scotland
The dissertation is a core component of a psychology undergraduate degree, though very little research has been conducted into supervision processes at undergraduate level. This study examined the accounts of supervisors of qualitative dissertations in order to identify current practices of supervision and possible resources that might support supervision. Seventeen supervisors from psychology departments in North East England and Scotland were i…
How assisted eating becomes a caring practice in institutional settings: Embodied gestures and stages of assisted eating
Assisted eating is a basic caring practice and the means through which many individuals receive adequate nutrition. Research in this area has noted the challenges of helping others to eat while upholding their independence, though has yet to explicate how this caring practice is achieved in detail and across the lifespan. This paper provides an empirical analysis of assisted eating episodes in two different institutions, detailing the processes t…
Mapping the components of the telephone conference: An Analysis of Tutorial Talk at a Distance Learning Institution
This article maps the components of telephone tutorial conferences (TTCs) used for distance learning in higher education. Using conversation analysis we identified four common sequences of TTCs as `calling in'; `agenda-setting'; `tutorial proper'; and `closing down'. Patterns of student participation look similar to those in face-to-face tutorials and the degree of interaction during `calling-in' and agenda setting does not foretell student parti…
Interaction as the foundation for eating practices in shared mealtimes
A brief commentary on discursive psychology and talking to others
This commentary provides a short reflection on the current status of discursive psychology in a fluctuating academic landscape. It focuses on three points: how discursive psychological research situates itself in relation to other research (both within and outside of psychology), how psychology itself can be respecified as a discipline (rather than only topic areas within psychology), and on the need for further development of methodological aspe…
Living with a chronic illness: Chinese-Canadian and Euro-Canadian women with diabetes—Exploring factors that influence management
Short Reviews
The Truth is out Where
Eating Your Words: Discursive Psychology and the Reconstruction of Eating Practices
Psychological research into eating practices has focused mainly on attitudes and behaviour towards food, and disorders of eating. Using experimental and questionnaire-based designs, these studies place an emphasis on individual consumption and cognitive appraisal, overlooking the interactive context in which food is eaten. The current article examines eating practices in a more naturalistic environment, using mealtime conversations tape-recorded …
Construction and Action in Food Evaluation: Conversational Data
This study engages both social psychological research on "attitudes" and discursive work on "evaluative practices." Methodological constraints in both of these fields have resulted in a relative lack of attention to everyday interaction. By using conversational data, the current study extends discursive research and highlights the constructive and constructed nature of food evaluations. Family mealtimes were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed …
Talking With Your Mouth Full: Gustatory Mmms and the Embodiment of Pleasure
This article examines the expression of gustatory pleasure as an interactional and discursive construction. Psychological studies of food and eating typically focus on the individual consumer, with bodily experiences conceptualized as internal and private events. It is argued that this approach underestimates the role of discourse and the interactional nature of food consumption. The expression of pleasure is examined here as a constructed and ev…
Attitudes and evaluative practices: Category vs. item and subjective vs. objective constructions in everyday food assessments
In social psychology, evaluative expressions have traditionally been understood in terms of their relationship to, and as the expression of, underlying ‘attitudes’. In contrast, discursive approaches have started to study evaluative expressions as part of varied social practices, considering what such expressions are doing rather than their relationship to attitudinal objects or other putative mental entities. In this study the latter approach wi…
Talking about taste: Using a discursive psychological approach to examine challenges to food evaluations
Good for 'You: Generic and Individual Healthy Eating Advice in Family Mealtimes
Healthy eating is one of the main concerns for health organizations in the UK, and has been widely promoted in recent decades. Yet despite the amount of nutritional information available, levels of obesity, heart disease and other food-related diseases remain high. Existing research in this area often uses individual accounts of consumption to examine the reasons why people may not be eating 'healthily'. An alternative way to approach this issue …
Size matters: Constructing accountable bodies in NSPCC helpline interaction
The focus on body size or weight has become an increasing source of concern in western society, yet few studies have looked at how people invoke body size in various settings, and the practices to which such talk might be related. Hence this study examines instances in everyday and institutional interaction in which body size is treated as a relevant concern for speakers. A discursive psychological approach is used to examine five extracts from t…
Developments in discursive psychology
Discursive psychology is the broad title for a range of research done in different disciplinary contexts – communication, language, sociology and psychology. It moves the theoretical and analytic f
Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management
Using work produced from the critical and postmodern arena in social sciences, this book examines three key areas - representation, identities and practice - to explore and interrogate how body and we
Using problem-based learning to teach qualitative research methods: The beginning
Mapping the components of the telephone conference: An Analysis of Tutorial Talk at a Distance Learning Institution
This article maps the components of telephone tutorial conferences (TTCs) used for distance learning in higher education. Using conversation analysis we identified four common sequences of TTCs as `calling in'; `agenda-setting'; `tutorial proper'; and `closing down'. Patterns of student participation look similar to those in face-to-face tutorials and the degree of interaction during `calling-in' and agenda setting does not foretell student parti…
Managing blame in NHS weight management treatment: Psychologizing weight and ‘obesity’
Weight management services in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) are on the increase, partly due to rising rates of patients classified as ‘obese’. Those attending such services are held accountable, on some level, for their weight, although this issue is rarely addressed in clinical research in this area. By contrast, critical social research on ‘obesity’ considers blame a prominent issue though has yet to examine this in situ , in interacti…
Doing being 'on the edge: Managing the Dilemma of Being Authentically Suicidal in an Online Forum
Those who attempt suicide have often been described as 'crying for help', and there are implications if such cries are not taken seriously. This paper examines how users of an Internet forum for 'suicidal thoughts' work up their authenticity in their opening posts, and how these are responded to by fellow forum users. Data were taken from two Internet forums on suicide over a period of one month and were analysed using discursive psychology. The …
Finishing the family meal. The interactional organisation of satiety
Criticizing the Critic: Comments on J ahoda's (2012) Critique of Discursive Social Psychology
J ahoda (2012) criticizes discursive social psychology ( DSP ) on several different grounds; specifically, he argues that DSP has opaque methodological procedures, is of questionable scientific merit, involves over‐interpretation of its data, and implicitly claims its findings to be universal rather than contextually specific. We challenge these criticisms by arguing that observational studies of the kind typical within DSP research have a perfec…
On the accountability of changing bodies: Using discursive psychology to examine embodied identities in different research settings
dentity is typically understood as something that individuals “have” or own, an essential part of one’s psychological state that guides how we behave and how we fit into society. By contrast, the d
Adult and child use of love, like, don’t like and hate during family mealtimes. Subjective category assessments as food preference talk
Qualitative undergraduate project supervision in psychology: Current practices and support needs of supervisors across North East England and Scotland
The dissertation is a core component of a psychology undergraduate degree, though very little research has been conducted into supervision processes at undergraduate level. This study examined the accounts of supervisors of qualitative dissertations in order to identify current practices of supervision and possible resources that might support supervision. Seventeen supervisors from psychology departments in North East England and Scotland were i…
Producing infant food preferences during weaning: The role of language and gesture in parent-–child interaction
Stepping Back From Crisis Points: The Provision and Acknowledgment of Support in an Online Suicide Discussion Forum
Suicide is a global health concern, though little is known about the social practices that might support those who are contemplating suicide. Online forums provide a unique insight into the anonymous discussion of suicide, including sociocultural norms about suicide and the delicate management of online interaction. The analysis illustrates how forum threads function as case studies and enable members to gain support on numerous occasions. In thi…
Esplat: A new society for enhancing learning and teaching in Psychology
A brief commentary on discursive psychology and talking to others
This commentary provides a short reflection on the current status of discursive psychology in a fluctuating academic landscape. It focuses on three points: how discursive psychological research situates itself in relation to other research (both within and outside of psychology), how psychology itself can be respecified as a discipline (rather than only topic areas within psychology), and on the need for further development of methodological aspe…
Psychology (32 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (21 works) · Social Psychology (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Linguistics (11 works) · Developmental psychology (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Digital Communication and Language (9 works)