Bodily expressions of dominance in children's reasoning : an analysis of multimodal and sociometric data

Abstract

This case study explores how two Hungarian children argue for their choices in a decision- making task in which they were asked to pick objects useful on a deserted island. The study involves an analysis of the multimodal data of the video-recorded tasks, carried out as pair-work, and sociometric background data that were collected in order to build an initial understanding of the participants’ social relations. The aim of the study is to discover how dominance relations manifest in bodily acts during reasoning. Results show that dominance was expressed by specific embodied strategies such as by taking away objects or replacing them, and that the bodily gestures were closely intertwined with the children’s verbal argumentation. Further, it was observed that bodily acts were significant from the point of view of decision-making.