Elizabeth Stokoe

• BSc, PhD, C.Psychol HonFBPsS
• Professor at London School of Economics and Political Science

Although researchers have recently started to investigate naturally occurring parent-child interactions in youth sport, the use of orthographic transcription, combined with video coding or thematic analysis, overlooks the interactional features resulting in researchers potentially over-simplifying such interactions. The purpose of the current study...

Conversation Analysis (CA) is one of the predominant methods for the detailed study of human social interaction. Bringing together thirty-four chapters written by a team of world-renowned experts, this Handbook represents the first comprehensive overview of conversation-analytic methods. Topics include how to collect, manage, and transcribe data; h...

In the UK, there is a greater prospect of receiving housing support if one is considered ‘vulnerable’ - that is, at unusual risk. However, there can be a disparity between applicant and provider in whether the applicant is indeed vulnerable. We investigate how one particular criterion, mental health, is constructed to reach the required threshold o...

This paper investigates how domestic violence and abuse, its underreporting and its links with alcohol consumption, manifest in and impact the outcome of help-seeking telephone calls to UK-based police services. Conversation analysis of call-takers' questions about alcohol found that they either 1) focused only on the perpetrator's drinking, and oc...

Research exploring the processes and effects of parent-child social interaction in youth sport has been limited by an overreliance on retrospective questionnaire and interview-based designs. The purpose of the current study was to examine the naturally occurring parent-child interactions which unfold during the post-competition car journey within B...

How do teachers decide when and how to help their students if not explicitly asked to do so? Based on conversation analysis of 14 h of video-recorded small group interactions in secondary schools, we discovered that teachers and students orient to subtle actions built through embodied conduct, to decide whether or not assistance is needed. We also...

Background: International guidelines recommend that primary care clinicians recognize obesity and offer treatment opportunistically, but there is little evidence on how clinicians can discuss weight and offer treatment in ways that are well received and effective. Objective: To examine relationships between language used in the clinical visit an...

Clinicians expect that talking to patients with obesity about potential/future weight loss will be a difficult conversation, especially if it is not the reason that a patient is seeking medical help. Despite this expectation, many governments ask clinicians to take every opportunity to talk to patients about weight to help manage increasing levels...

In “cold” sales calls, the salesperson's job is to turn call-takers, or “prospects,” into clients while, very often, the latter resist them. In contrast to laboratory-based research, “cold” calls provide a natural environment where the stakes are real and resistance is manifest. We collected and transcribed 159 “cold” calls the goal of which was fo...

This paper explores how police negotiators offer “help” to suicidal persons in crisis. The phrase “a cry for help” is long associated with suicide ideation, and “help” is a key offer made in crisis situations. However, we know little about how “help” is formulated, and received, in crisis encounters as they actually unfold. Fourteen cases (31 h) of...

The paper investigates participation and engagement during an online medical education conference by examining delegate interactions in the parallel chat function of the video platform. Although much is known about the experiential nature of online conferencing, we know far less about what actually happens in the live unfolding chat itself. We coll...

Requesting police assistance can be especially challenging in cases of domestic violence, since perpetrators may be able to overhear victims’ telephone calls. This means that callers may not be able to make direct requests for help. Simultaneously, a routine task for police call-takers is to categorize incoming calls as genuine rather than, say, ac...

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stanc...

Obesity is a major worldwide public health problem. Clinicians are asked to communicate public health messages, including encouraging and supporting weight loss, during consultations with patients living with obesity. However, research shows that talking about weight with patients rarely happens and both parties find it difficult to initiate. Curre...

Police negotiators work in small units or teams. In a crisis negotiation, one of the team becomes the ‘primary’ negotiator and talks with the person in crisis. However, because the person in crisis may refuse to participate, and because several negotiators are co-present, there are multiple opportunities for negotiators to talk between themselves,...

Since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, in the UK and elsewhere, the phrase “living with covid”—and variations such as “live with it,” “learning to live with the virus”—has circulated in public discourse. It refers to, and summarises, increasingly polarised positions with regards to the pandemic: on the one hand, accept the virus and resist adapt...

Elizabeth Stokoe is Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University and was named as an Honorary Fellow by the BPS in 2021. Beyond academia, Liz is well known for developing the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method (‘CARM’) and working with industry including software companies like Typeform and Deployed. Additionally, Liz has a wide-r...

Research exploring the processes and effects of parent-child social interaction in youth sport has been limited by an overreliance on retrospective questionnaire and interview-based designs. The purpose of the current study was to examine the naturally occurring parent-child interactions which unfold during the pre-competition car journey within Br...

The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the complex relationship between science and policy. Policymakers have had to make decisions at speed in conditions of uncertainty, implementing policies that have had profound consequences for people's lives. Yet this process has sometimes been characterised by fragmentation, opacity and a disconnect betw...

A key requirement of COVID-19 pandemic behavioural regulations in many countries was for people to 'physically distance' from one another, which meant departing radically from established norms of everyday human sociality. Previous research on new norms has been retrospective or prospective, focusing on reported levels of adherence to regulations o...

The emergence of the omicron variant has raised concerns that the pandemic is not yet over. These authors outline four key lessons that governments need to learn from to protect against future pandemic

https://elizabeth-stokoe.medium.com/the-softness-of-hard-data-475743d8a2f2

Marketing research shows that organizations tailor communication for particular customer ‘segments’, but little is known about the live design of interaction for different categories. To investigate this, we examine telephone calls to a holiday sales call-centre (for ‘seniors’) and a university admissions call-centre (for ‘young’ students). While t...

A key requirement of COVID-19 pandemic behavioural regulations in many countries was for people to ‘physically distance’ from one another, which meant departing radically from established norms of everyday human sociality. Previous research on new norms has been retrospective (or prospective), focusing on reported levels of adherence to the regulat...

The assessment of oral skills is a key part of school examination systems around the world. Typically, examiners engage candidates in a conversational encounter to elicit assessable talk. However, we know little about how examiner's elicitations may impact, constrain, or create opportunities for subsequent talk by candidates. In this study, we anal...

Objective Guidelines recommend that clinicians should offer patients with obesity referrals to weight management services. However, clinicians and patients worry that such conversations will generate friction, and the risk of this is greatest when patients say no. We examined how doctors actually respond to patient refusals, and how patients reacte...

How we feel about the duration of our conversations has rarely been studied. New research has asked people about the lengths of their conversations, and whether they end when they want them to. Study investigates how people feel about the duration of conversations.

Background GPs are encouraged to make brief interventions to support weight loss, but they report concern about these conversations, stating that they need more details on what to say. Knowing how engage in these conversations could encourage GPs to deliver brief interventions for weight loss more frequently. Objective To examine which specific wo...

This article explores whether and how word selection makes some proposals easier to resist than others. Fourteen cases (31 hours) of UK-based police crisis negotiation were analyzed exploring (a) how negotiators use the verbs talk or speak when proposing “dialogue,” and (b) to what extent the strength of resistance of persons in crisis toward the p...

While there are many definitions and conceptual accounts of ‘persuasion’ and other forms of social influence, social scientists lack empirical insight into how and when people actually use terms like ‘persuade’, ‘convince’, ‘change somebody's mind’ – what we call the vocabularies of social influence – in actual social interaction. We collected inst...

This paper reveals how negotiators, from the police and emergency call centres, overcome resistance towards the negotiation from suicidal persons in crisis. Communication guidance to hostage and crisis negotiators recommends against challenging the person in crisis, focusing instead on a softer, rapportful approach. Using conversation analysis, we...

La « méthode du jeu de rôle en analyse conversationnelle » (Conversation AnalyticRole-play Method, CARM) est une approche qui, sur la base de preuves tirées del’analyse conversationnelle, propose de s’entraîner à faire face aux problèmes etobstacles qui peuvent survenir dans les interactions institutionnelles. Les méthodestraditionnelles de formati...

In this article, I describe how psychologists who work with language—in particular, naturally occurring social interaction—can develop evidence-based communication training for professionals. I start by situating my research in discursive psychology and conversation analysis and explaining some points of (dis)connection between mainstream and quali...

This article examines business-to-business “cold” calls between salespeople and prospective clients. Drawing on 150 audio-recorded interactions, we use conversation analysis to identify the overarching structural organization and constituent activities in first-time and subsequent “cold” calls, a distinction that emerged from participants’ orientat...

Persuasion is a ubiquitous presence in everyday life, with decades of research from across the social sciences, and, of course, particularly within psychology. Nevertheless, in this paper, we argue that we still know very little about the actual manifestations of persuasive conduct ‘in the wild’. Taking a discursive psychological approach to the st...

Since its inception in 1987, Discursive Psychology (DP) has developed both methodologically, for instance by drawing closer to Conversation Analysis, and theoretically, by building a body of knowledge which outlines the discursive accomplishment of mind-world relations. One of DP’s contributions to psychology consists in the respecification of main...

This article shows how speakers mobilise characterological formulations of people and, particularly, ‘types’ of persons, in social action. We extend previous work in discursive psychology, in which notions of self or others’ identity have been well-studied as categorial practices, by focusing specifically on the occasioned use of ‘[descriptor] pers...

Conversation analysts have long since demonstrated that, in responding to an initiating action (e.g., question), recipients have at least two ways to respond; response options (e.g., answer, non-answer) are not equivalent, and ‘preferred’ responses are typically delivered more rapidly than ‘dispreferred’ responses. This paper examines cases in whic...

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine the naturally occurring parent-child interactions which occur before, during, and after tennis competitions. Background: Although considerable academic attention has focused on parent-child interactions before, during, and after competitions in youth sport (see Harwood et al., 2019), there...

This position paper identifies a crucial opportunity for the reciprocal exchange of methods, data and phenomena between conversation analysis (CA), ethnomethodology (EM) and computer science (CS). Conventional CS classification of sentiment, tone of voice, or personality do not address what people do with language or the paired sequences that organ...

How authentic are inquiry calls made by simulated clients, or ‘mystery shoppers’, to service organizations, when compared to real callers? We analysed 48 simulated and 63 real inquiry calls to different veterinary practices in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The data were transcribed for conversation analysis, as well as coded for a variety of call...

The biggest challenge for voice technologies is action recognition. This is partly because current approaches prioritize abstract context over practical action, and tend to ignore the detailed, sequential structure of talk by emulating scripted, often stereotypical dialogue. This provocation paper analyzes an urgent case of how a caller and a 911 d...

Background: Clinical guidelines exhort clinicians to encourage patients to improve their health behaviours. However, most offer little support on how to have these conversations in practice. Clinicians fear that health behaviour change talk will create interactional difficulties and discomfort for both clinician and patient. This review aims to id...

When people are in dispute with their neighbours, there are multiple routes to resolution, and different services have a range of remits to support it. This article explores how noise complaints are reported to dispute resolution mediation and local council environmental services in the United Kingdom. A collection of 315 recorded telephone calls w...

When a person in crisis threatens suicide, police negotiators engage them in a conversation to prevent death. Working in small teams, the primary negotiator's role is to talk directly to the person in crisis. A secondary negotiator, working “behind the scenes,” supports the ongoing negotiation. Using 31 hours of audio‐recorded British negotiations,...

The practice of evaluating one's own performance or that of another is ubiquitous across workplace and institutional settings and is foundational to the educational endeavour. In contrast to the traditional dynamic of teachers assessing students’ performance, however, this paper focuses on how students evaluate their own performance in feedback mee...

Aims To explore how often the participation of parents in their infants’ care and professionals’ support for parents was documented in the clinical records and to determine how such participation and support were documented. Background Comprehensive documentation can facilitate collaboration between parents and health care professionals, supportin...

Social psychology has theorized the cognitive processes underlying persuasion, without considering its interactional infrastructure—the discursive actions through which persuasion is accomplished interactionally. Our article aims to fill this gap, by using discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine 153 “cold” calls, in which salespe...

This paper investigates an area of political discourse that has hitherto existed in an analytic ‘black box’: the constituency office. We focus on the interactions between ordinary British people as they engage directly in ‘political’ discussions with their Member of Parliament. While the majority of surgery talk surrounds complaints about services,...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Background: Guidelines encourage GPs to make brief opportunistic interventions to support weight loss. However, GPs fear that starting these discussions will lead to lengthy consultations. Recognising that patients are committed to take action could allow GPs to shorten brief interventions. Aim: To examine which patient responses indicated commi...

In this paper, we present an analysis of how constituents procure services at the constituency office of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom. This paper will investigate how several previously documented interactional practices (e.g. entitlement) combine at the constituency office in a way that secures service. From a corpus of 12.5 h...

This paper examines how delivering bad news may be avoided in conversations where rejection is common. We collected ∼2000 recordings of telephone calls from prospective students to a UK university contact centre during an annual process called 'Clearing and Adjustment'. Applicants call to secure a place on a degree programme but are often ineligibl...

Effective police interviews are central to the justice process for sexual assault victims, but little is known about either actual communication between police officers and witnesses or the alignment between guidance and real practice. This study investigated how police officers, in formal interviews, follow ‘best evidence’ guidance to obtain victi...

How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This article presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon and its transcribed recordings as pub...

In this chapter, I will explore the mediation of neighbour and family conflicts through the lens of discursive psychology, focusing particularly on what interaction between mediators and their prospective clients (neighbours, parents) tells us about the nature of dispute and the efficacy of mediation. I will describe a research project, from its in...

Teaching Dialogue Interpreting is one of the very few book-length contributions that cross the research-to-training boundary in dialogue interpreting. The volume is innovative in at least three ways. First, it brings together experts working in areas as diverse as business interpreting, court interpreting, medical interpreting, and interpreting for...

In formal police interviews, interviewers may have institutionally mandated reasons for following up even apparently fully co-operative answers with questions that imply that the interviewee is in fact (knowingly or unknowingly) being uncooperative. From a sample of over 100 UK interviews with suspects arrested for minor offences, and 19 interviews...

This article examines patients’ calls to three different GP services in the United Kingdom. Using conversation analysis, combined with coding of 447 calls, we studied the role of thank you in closing sequences, focusing on their timing and order in relation to service outcome. We show first how patients withhold thank you in orientation to an absen...

This article reports on the results of two studies into telephone calls from patients to receptionists at three different UK GP surgeries. The research shows how staff can drive the telephone call forwards to benefit both the practice and patients

This paper showcases work in 'categorial systematics' () and the sequential analysis of categories in interaction, in the context of current developments in membership categorization analysis. It shows how, in a corpus of sales calls, categorial matters are initiated and managed as salespeople elicit information about prospective customers. In part...

Objective To determine the short-term outcomes of babies for whom clinicians or parents discussed the limitation of life-sustaining treatment (LST). Design Prospective multicentre observational study. Setting Two level 3, six level 2 and one level 1 neonatal units in the North-East London Neonatal Network. Participants A total of 87 babies inclu...

Background: There are over 1500 UK health helplines in operation, yet we have scant knowledge about the resources in place to support the seeking and delivering of cancer-related telephone help and support. This research aimed to identify and describe cancer and cancer-related helpline service provision: the number of helplines available, the vari...

This paper examines the work done by formulations in the service of pursuing solutions to disputes between neighbours in a community mediation setting. In particular, it shows how mediators formulate the talk of mediation clients – the parties in dispute – in a particular sequence of activities. Parties’ complaints are formulated by the mediator, o...