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 original research in youth justice, jury deliberations in mock rape trials, and police interviews delivers interactional insights into conversations that take place in and represent the core business of criminal justice systems. Her scholarly leadership includes co-founding the annual Forensic Conversations symposium in 2024 along with Emma Richardson, drawing together global scholars using discursive psychology (DP) ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) to examine interactions in criminal justice settings. Laura’s forthcoming double-volume book, co-edited with Emma Richardson and commissioned by Palgrave, will make a major disciplinary contribution by showcasing and consolidating cutting-edge international work on DP and EMCA in forensic and criminal justice contexts.
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
- Richardson, E., Jenkins, L., and Willmott, D. (2025) Rape myths, jury deliberations, and conversation analysis: Examining conversational practices used to undermine rape complainants within (mock) jury deliberations. Journal of Criminal Justice, 9, 102461, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2025.102461
- Richardson, E., Heini, A., Jenkins, L., and Stokoe, E. (2025) How ‘vulnerability’ manifests as an interactional asymmetry in police interviews with suspects and intellectually impaired witnesses. Symbolic Interaction https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.70023
- Jenkins, L., Hepburn, A., Potter, J., and Macdougall, C. (2025) Communicating anaphylaxis risk in pediatric allergy consultations: A conversation analytic study. Patient Education and Counselling, 140, 109284. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2025.109284
- Tremblett, M.,* Jenkins, L.,* (*joint first authors), Hepburn, A., and Potter, J. (2025) Special section on communicating risk in actual clinical consultations. Patient Education and Counselling, 140:109283. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2025.109283 . Epub 2025 Jul 29. PMID: 40773819
- 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
- Jenkins, L., Hepburn, A., Potter, J., and Macdougall, C. (2024) “Are you otherwise fit and well?”: Past medical history questions in UK paediatric consultations. Patient Education and Counselling, 121, 108104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738399123004858
- 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
- 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