Laura specialises in recording and analysing interactions to better understand communication and relationships. Using the tools of conversation analysis, she studies interactions across everyday and institutional settings ranging from family mealtimes to medical encounters and jury deliberations in mock rape trials.
The focus of Laura’s Vice Chancellor Independent Research Fellowship is youth justice. She is identifying effective practices for facilitating children’s meaningful engagement. To do this, she is examining recorded conversations between children and youth justice practitioners. Her findings and evidence-based training resources will support the implementation of a ‘Child First’ approach in practice.
With a background in Psychology (BSc) and Health Psychology (MSc), Laura obtained her PhD at Loughborough University in 2013. She held post-doctoral positions at the Universities of Sheffield, Nottingham, and Loughborough. Laura was awarded runner up in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities category “Outstanding Early Career Researcher” (June 2023).
Laura is a member of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) committee.
Laura studies audio and video-recordings of real-life interactions using an approach called conversation analysis. She uses the findings to develop and deliver evidence-based communication training. Laura’s research spans:
- Conversations with children
- Medical communication
- Interactions in criminal justice settings
Conversations with children
Laura’s primary focus on youth justice is part of her broader portfolio of research on interactions with children. She seeks to answer questions about how a child’s status and rights become a reality (or are contested and resisted) in real time as conversations unfold. Laura’s research includes children’s engagement in youth justice, how children express pain at home and their rights to describe their own experiences, how children contribute within paediatric consultations, and how children’s vulnerability becomes live in police interviews.
Medical communication
Laura has published detailed descriptions of communication strategies she observed in recorded consultations in neurology, paediatrics, and palliative care. Some examples include ways to support adult patients to describe their experiences in their own terms, practices for carefully raising sensitive topics (such as death and dying), and techniques for describing risk (in paediatric allergy). Laura transformed her systematic findings into conversation analytic training. In neurology, this led to changes in how doctors asked patients questions about seizures. The result - doctors were able to recognise medically relevant linguistic features which could help improve diagnosis. In palliative care, Laura’s training module on asking patients about pain forms part of the RealTalk training initiative, adopted by over 400 healthcare communication trainers across the UK.
Criminal justice settings
Laura’s research in youth justice, jury deliberations in mock rape trials, and police interviews delivers interactional insights into conversations that take place and comprise criminal justice systems. Along with Emma Richardson, Laura co-organised the Forensic Conversations symposium (2024), drawing together global scholars using ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to examine interactions in criminal justice settings.
Laura has acted as module lead for undergraduate and postgraduate modules in:
- Statistics
- Developmental psychology
- Applied conversation analysis
She has taught on:
- Qualitative and quantitative research methods
- Forensic, health, and social psychology
- Criminology
Current Supervision
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Katie Jordin. Title: Learning To Be A Boy - How everyday conversation teaches and upholds heteronormative gender constraints to boys.
Key Publications
- Jenkins, L., Ekberg, S., Wang, N. (2024) Communication in Pediatric Healthcare: A State-of-the-Art Literature Review of Conversation-Analytic Research. Research on Language and Social Interaction 57 (1), 91-108 https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2024.2305046
- Pino, M., Jenkins, L. (2023) Inviting the patient to talk about a conversation they had with another healthcare practitioner: A way of promoting discussion about disease progression and end of life in palliative care interactions. Health Communication 39 (4), 778-792 https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2185579
- Jenkins, L., Hepburn, A., Potter, J., Macdougall, C. (2023) “Are you otherwise fit and well?”: Past medical history questions in UK paediatric consultations. Patient Education and Counseling, 108104 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2023.108104
- Richardson, E., Jenkins, L., Willmott, D. (2023) Rape Myths, Jury Deliberations, and Conversation Analysis: A New Approach to an age-old Problem. Emerald Opinion & Blog https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/opinion-and-blog/rape-myths-jury-deliberations-and-conversation-analysis-a-new-approach-age-old
- Parry, R., Whittaker, B., Pino, M., Jenkins, L., Worthington, E., Faull, C. (2022) RealTalk evidence-based communication training resources: development of conversation analysis-based materials to support training in end-of-life-related health and social care conversations BMC Medical Education 22 (1), 637 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-022-03641-y
- Jenkins, L., Parry, R., Pino, M. (2021) Providing opportunities for patients to say more about their pain without overtly asking: A conversation analysis of doctors repeating patient answers in palliative care pain assessment. Applied Linguistics 42 (5), 990-1013 https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amaa062
- Ekberg, S., Parry, R., Land, V., Ekberg, K., Pino, M., Antaki, C., Jenkins, L., Whittaker, B. (2021) Communicating with patients and families about illness progression and end of life: a review of studies using direct observation of clinical practice. BMC Palliative Care 20, 1-12 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12904-021-00876-2
- Jenkins, L., Hepburn, A., MacDougall, C. (2020) How and why children instigate talk in pediatric allergy consultations: A conversation analytic account. Social Science & Medicine 266, 113291 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113291