| Summary: | I use content analysis to address the relationship between sex and race with interactions and activities in bestselling children’s books. Research into children’s books presents a mixed picture for changing portrayals, with different patterns in representations appearing for protagonists and central characters compared to characters in general. I argue that interactions are important for assessing representations and that there is a difference between being present and being involved. The actor is utilized to strike a balance between presence and importance by showing who is participating. Interactions are used to examine how actors interrelate. These show the nature of the interactions that occur between groups of actors and in specific spheres of activity (work, leisure, home, school, sport, play, beautification and emotion). This approach goes beyond most research into representations. My findings come from a content analysis using functional coding categories which are based upon a Quantitative Narrative Analysis text grammar. This means that connections between coding categories are explicitly specified by the grammar and that I can link actors, as grammatical subjects and objects, through actions. This is very different from findings based on subjectively selected themes; the coding categories used here are grounded within the linguistic characteristics of the text itself.
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