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.