Detective Stories At Dinnertime: Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration

For over a year, our research groupl has been going into homes in the early evening for several hours, videoand audiorecording families eating dinner, relaxing, and putting children to bed. We are analyzing ways in which white, English-speaking American families varying in social class solve problems through talk. The present analysis is based on over a hundred hours of recorded interactions, approximately eight hours for each of 14 families (8 high SES and 6 low SES) from our initial corpus. In this paper, our focus is on narrative as a problem-solving discourse activity. Our concern is the interface of cognitive and social activity, as outlined in Vygotskian theory (Vygotsky 1978, 1981, Wertsch 1985, Rogoff & Lave 1984). Our data indicate how problem-solving through story-telling is