Data and procedure
Our data is drawn from This Morning, a popular free to air, live
UK television daily broadcast show aimed at a daytime audience. Each
show dedicates a slot to debate a pre-determined current affairs topic
for discussion with invited guests. We collected forty-three debates
from broadcasts that aired between February 2016 - March 2019. All
debates were publicly available via YouTube at the point of collection.
Our inclusion criteria solely required that debates concern child and/or
family related issues. Examples include: “Is it okay to tell off other
people’s children?”; “Should children be weighed in schools?”;
“Should your teen share a bed with their partner?”. Thus, whilst
motherhood is not the central topic, these are debates where motherhood
category membership might be engaged by speakers.
The first author watched all debates and identified a subset of eighteen
debates for analysis11Access to youtube links for the debates
analysed will be provided upon request to the corresponding author.
In eleven of these debates, motherhood is explicitly marked, either by
participants being categorised by other speakers, or participants
self-categorising as a mother. In the remaining seven debates, speakers
orient to motherhood via talk about their children. Each debate lasts an
average of six minutes duration. Extended sequences of talk where
motherhood category membership was focal were extracted and transcribed
to aid further detailed analysis. The first author led the analysis. The
second author watched all eighteen debates and contributed to the
detailed analysis of the selected extracts.