How to get someone to play with you: Format differences in recruiting others to participate in family play activities

Abstract

In this paper I examine how children and their parents engage the participation of others specifically in the context of play. Video-recorded data from everyday family interactions with at least one child between the ages of 3 and 6 were collected. In this paper I analyze the activity of recruiting, finding that wanna-format recruiting is more versatile than let's-format recruiting. Let's-format recruiting occurs only when the interactants are already engaged in an activity together, whereas wanna-format recruiting can occur then and when the interactants are not engaged together in an activity. This paper has implications for our understanding of participation in the context of play activities and the concept of recruitment. Data are in American and Canadian English.