The Dialogic Socialization of Aggression in a Family's Court of Reason and Inquiry.

In a family's “court of reason and inquiry,” a quasi‐legal institution emerging periodically in ordinary family conversation, moral judgments about individuals and their relationships are heard and discussed. This is an interpretive study of one family's court discourse concerning aggression between two brothers (9 years, 9 months and 11 years, 11 months). It is conducted through an analysis of 10 parental strategies, representing all the turns within a long conversation (194 turns) in which parents took the lead in promoting their younger son's narrative and logical understanding of his offensive action. Toulmin's (1963) theory of logic as “generalized jurisprudence” and Schank and Abelson's (1977) script theory are used as frameworks for the analysis of the microdevelopment of family moral understanding. In judging their son's verbal actions as instigatory, both parents independently concentrated their strategies on his moral intentions, retold and criticized his stories so that he shared responsibility...