Paul Drew

The University of York · Department of Language and Linguistic Science

We report the development and assessment of a novel coding framework in the context of research into neonatal end-of-life decision making conversations. Data comprised 27 formal conversations between doctors and parents of critically ill babies, recorded in two neonatal intensive care units. The coding framework was developed from a qualitative ana...

We have conducted conversational analysis of intrahospital telephone calls in which a recovery room nurse notifies the wards that, having concluded their treatment, a patient is ready for transfer. The article contributes to the understanding of recruitment as the outcome of interactional methods securing involvement-assistance, cooperation or cont...

This study explores a particular kind of enactment in storytelling sequences where a story recipient is recruited by the teller as a designated character in the scene being acted out. Using the conversation-analytic methodological approach, we found that the enactment under investigation often occurred where a response (from the recruited recipient...

Common mental health problems of anxiety and depression affect significant proportions of the global population. Within the UK, and increasingly across western countries, a key policy response has been the introduction of high volume, low intensity psychological assessment and treatment services, such as the NHS's Improving Access to Psychological...

An introduction to Gail Jefferson's remarkable series of papers focusing on self-correction, and to the genius of her approach to Conversation Analysis.

Double verb constructions known as hendiadys have been studied primarily in literary texts and corpora of written language. Much less is known about their properties and usage in spoken language, where expressions such as ‘come and see’, ‘go and tell’, ‘sit and talk’ are particularly common, and where we can find an even richer diversity of other c...

We begin by reviewing the landmark conversation analytic study of courtroom interaction, Order in Court: The Organisation of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings (1979), in which Atkinson and Drew first explored the differences between the turn-taking systems for ordinary social conversation, and for courtroom interactions. The pre-allocated and...

This article considers patient choice in mental healthcare services, specifically the ways that choice is enabled or constrained in patient-practitioner spoken interaction. Using the method of conversation analysis (CA), we examine the language used by practitioners when presenting treatment delivery options to patients entering the NHS Improving A...

Objective: To understand the dynamics of conversations between neonatologists and parents concerning limitation of life-sustaining treatments. Design: Formal conversations were recorded, transcribed and analysed according to the conventions and methods of conversation analysis. Setting: Two tertiary neonatal intensive care units. Participants...

This article reports findings from a study of police interviews of people suspected of having committed relatively minor criminal offences, in a police station in England. The data comprise audio-recorded investigative interviews which were analysed using conversation analysis. It is focused on a communicative practice employed by police officers w...

During daily hospital ward rounds, medical teams, led by doctors, assess the progress of an individual patient’s health. It is widely reported in the research literature that nurses play a relatively passive role during these rounds, because although they may have valuable information about the patient’s condition and progress, and indeed their rol...

Since the COVID-19 lockdown, it is temporarily not possible for IAPT practitioners to deliver psychological therapies face-to-face. For Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners (PWPs) who are unused to telephone and online delivery, this may present something of a challenge. In this brief note, we offer some practical suggestions to help PWPs in this...

Objective: To investigate whether parent-initiated or doctor-initiated decisions about limiting life-sustaining treatment (LST) in neonatal care has consequences for how possible courses of action are presented. Method: Formal conversations (n = 27) between doctors and parents of critically ill babies from two level 3 neonatal intensive care uni...

Background: Despite comparable clinical outcomes, therapists and patients express reservations about the delivery of psychological therapy by telephone. These concerns centre around the quality of the therapeutic relationship and the ability to exercise professional skill and judgement in the absence of visual cues. However, the empirical evidence...

The Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination (ACE-111) is a neuropsychological test used in clinical practice to inform a dementia diagnosis. The ACE-111 relies on standardized administration so that patients’ scores can be interpreted by comparison with normative scores. The test is delivered and responded to in interaction between clinicians and patie...

This is an investigation into conflict and discord in conversations between couples (heterosexual partners) in ordinary households in mainland China. Based on a corpus of face-to-face and telephone conversations in Mandarin, our analysis shows that participants’ arguments are ‘kept under control’ through a variety of communicative (linguistic) prac...

Goffman (1971) proposed that apologies are, or at least should be, proportional to the offenses they are designed to remediate. In a previous quantitative study (Heritage & Raymond 2016), we found mixed support for such a principle of proportionality. The present article aims to unpack some of the difficulties encountered in that largely positivist...

This paper concerns interprofessional decision-making in hospital ward rounds. Ward rounds are led by doctors, and nurses can experience difficulties in participating during case constructions, even though they may have valuable information about the patient's condition and progress. In particular, difficulties can arise if the nurse's knowledge is...

Objective: To describe the nature of patient concerns and to explore if, when and how they are addressed by GPs in the UK. Methods: Detailed coding and descriptive analysis of 185 video recordings from the EPaC study (Elicitation of Patient Concerns, EPaC) Results: An average of 2.1 concerns were raised per consultation and the most common concer...

I explore some of the interconnections between inferences that participants make about one another’s (verbal) conduct, the implications they attribute to prior turns at talk, and the indirectness with which recipients may respond to enquiries - in short, the interconnections between inference, implication and indirectness. These are explored in the...

The recruitment of assistance constitutes a basic organisational problem for participants in social interaction. The methods of recruitment that we have identified include embodied displays of trouble, which create opportunities for others to give or offer assistance. In this report, we examine one coherent set of such embodied displays in detail:...

Objectives: to establish: a) feasibility of training GPs in a communication intervention to solicit additional patient concerns early in the consultation, using specific lexical formulations (“do you have ‘any’ vs. ‘some’ other concerns?”) noting the impact on consultation length, and b) whether patients attend with multiple concerns and whether th...

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of (the relevance of) epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other (1) are embedded in turns and sequences, (2) inform the design of turns at talk, (3) are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epist...

A Special Issue of this journal, edited by Lynch et al., was published critiquing research in conversation analysis (CA) on epistemics and on oh. It would be more accurate to say that the articles in that Special Issue critique the work of Heritage on epistemics and oh. Their principal criticism is that Heritage’s analyses of epistemics and oh are...

Objective: Specialist services for dementia are seeing an increasing number of patients. We investigated whether interactional and linguistic features in the communication behavior of patients with memory problems could help distinguish between those with problems secondary to neurological disorders (ND) and those with functional memory disorder (...

The recruitment of assistance constitutes a basic organizational problem for participants in social interaction. The methods of recruitment that we have identified include embodied displays of trouble which create opportunities for others to give or offer assistance. In this report, we examine one coherent set of such embodied displays in detail: v...

In this article, búshì in Mandarin Chinese is divided into Type 1 default use, that is, the negation bú shì, and the Type 2 marked use, that is, the confirmation búshì. These two different uses of búshì are different in their semantic meaning and pragmatic functions no matter whether they take the form of or are embedded in declarative or interroga...

This paper explores the intersection between two very different contexts-domestic life and the workplace-and the membrane which lies between them. This membrane is manifest in the practices through which participants come to treat certain of their identities as salient for the present interaction. This is explored through close examination of a con...

Examining a corpus of invitations made in telephone calls, in English (US and UK), there is evidently some variation in the design of turns in which the invitations are made, in their lexico-grammatical format. The variation in the forms through which these invitations are delivered are associated, broadly speaking, with two intersecting contingenc...

In his authoritative and brilliant account of Pragmatics, Levinson (1983) included Conversation Analysis (CA) as firmly part of Pragmatics. Others have perhaps been more cautious, even sceptical, about whether CA is really relevant to the Pragmatics programme; and it has to be said that some conversation analysts have been rather stand-offish about...

Introduction Conversation Analysis (CA) can help with the differential diagnosis of seizure disorders. We investigated if CA could be used in the memory clinic to distinguish neurodegenerative (NDD) from functional memory disorders (FMD). Methods We recruited consecutive, patients newly referred to the Neurology-led memory Clinic. Consultations we...

Objectives: In the UK dementia is under-diagnosed, there is limited access to specialist memory clinics, and many of the patients referred to such clinics are ultimately found to have functional (non-progressive) memory disorders (FMD), rather than a neurodegenerative disorder. Government initiatives on 'timely diagnosis' aim to improve the rate an...

There are occasions on which we simply don't understand what the other is trying to say. We may be able (more or less) to hear what they are saying, we can make out the words, but we don't understand what they are saying or trying to tell us. When this occurs we can encounter a pretty radical communication breakdown— incomprehension. Just such a ra...

In this article, we examine methods that participants use to resolve troubles in the realization of practical courses of action. The concept of recruitment is developed to encompass the linguistic and embodied ways in which assistance may be sought—requested or solicited—or in which we come to perceive another’s need and offer or volunteer assistan...

In their commentaries, both Heritage (2016/this issue) and Zinken and Rossi (2016/this issue) provide some context for our concept of and approach to recruitment in terms of previous research into requesting and offering. In doing so, they usefully consider what might be the “boundaries” of recruitment—what might be included and what might not be i...

Download here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078273 There would be little adaptive value in a complex communication system like human language if there were no ways to detect and correct problems. A systematic comparison of conversation in a broad sample of the world’s languages reveals a universal system for the real-time resolution of...

Absent apologies—apologies that were expected but are not forthcoming—are quite frequently identified and commented on, for instance in the media. In this article we discuss two kinds of evidence that apologies can be noticeably absent for participants in ordinary interactions. The first kind is the delays that can occur in the progressivity in tal...

In the UK dementia is under-diagnosed, there is limited access to specialist memory clinics, and many of the patients referred to such clinics are ultimately found to have functional (non-progressive) memory disorders (FMD), rather than a neurodegenerative disorder. Government initiatives on 'timely diagnosis' aim to improve the rate and quality of...

This paper reports findings from the first study based on recordings of advisory interviews with benefits claimants in the United Kingdom. Previous econometric analysis found that programmes for unemployed people delivered through private sector Employment Zones (EZs) were more effective than their public sector equivalents, delivered through Jobce...

Within the context of teacher/whole-class instruction sequences, researchers have associated teacher evaluation of pupils’ answers to forms of traditional pedagogic discourse, also referred to as ‘triadic dialogue’, ‘monologic discourse’, ‘recitation’ and ‘Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) sequences’. Teacher evaluation has also been associated...

We report on a study commissioned by the UK government of the ways in which advisers conduct mandatory interviews with unemployment benefits claimants. Among other results, we identified practices in soliciting claimants’ job goals and job plans that were more, or less, effective in achieving desired outcomes during these interactions. Moreover, we...

Requesting and offering are closely related, insofar as they are activities associated with someone's need for assistance. It has been supposed (e.g., Schegloff 2007) that requests and offers are not equivalent actions – specifically that offers are preferred actions and requests are dispreferred. We review the evidence for this claim across a corp...

Medical and healthcare organisations-including the national cancer support and helpline organisation that is the subject of this study-are expected to collect and monitor information about the ethnicity of their client populations. Information about ethnicity is important for a variety of reasons, including monitoring need and targeting healthcare...

The principle of personalisation is widespread across the UK's public sector, but precisely what this means is unclear. A number of theoretical typologies have been proposed but there has been little empirical study of how personalisation is translated into practice on the frontline. We address this gap through analysis of a unique dataset: over 20...

This article considers spoken interaction in semi-structured qualitative research interviews, comparing those that are conducted by telephone or face-to-face. It draws upon recent empirical research that illuminated some of the differences that may be observed between these two interview modes. Methodological techniques drawn from Conversation Anal...

A comparison of conversation in twenty-one languages from around the world reveals commonalities and differences in the way that people do open-class other-initiation of repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks, 1977; Drew, 1997). We find that speakers of all of the spoken languages in the sample make use of a primary interjection strategy (in Engli...

Purpose: To extend our previous research demonstrating that linguistic/interactional features in patients' talk can assist the challenging differential diagnosis of epilepsy and psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) by exploring the differential diagnostic potential of references to non co-present persons (third parties). Method: Initial enco...

Introduction Turn Design in Sequence Turn Design and Action Recipient Design Conclusions

In this research, we analyse the sequential environments in which indirectness is used in everyday conversations. This is a distinct break with traditional research into indirectness, which often focuses on the psychological conditions for felicitously doing and/or comprehending an indirect speech act. This innovative approach allows us to show wha...

Introduction. One of the cornerstones of conversation analytic research into social interaction is our close exploration of turn design - the ways in which speakers design their turns with respect to where in a sequence a turn is being taken, what is being done in that turn and to whom the turn is addressed; in short, in constructing their turns at...

With the economic downturn of 2009, Jobcentre Plus, the UK service that gives employment advice and administers unemployment benefits, has come under increased media scrutiny. Can it deliver the personalised service it purports to offer, given the 90 per cent increase in number of claimants arriving at its doors? The media have been sceptical, even...

The primary aim of the study was to identify those techniques and styles used by advisers during Work Focused Interviews (WFIs) that were most effective in moving people closer to work, and to make recommendations concerning effective practice in WFIs. The findings highlight the importance of an interview style that is collaborative, directive, pro...

Not infrequently in conversation, a speaker launches an activity which in some way or other is intercepted by another co-participant, or is otherwise unsuccessful, such that it receives no proper uptake. Activities of this kind may simply be lost. However, speakers who did not succeed may also 'try again'. In this paper, we describe three ways of '...

This report presents findings from an exploratory comparison of interactions between personal advisers and older and younger clients during Work Focused Interviews (WFIs). The study used the method of Conversation Analysis to explore a set of video and audio recordings of WFIs taking place in Jobcentre Plus offices. The study compared the structure...

This report, arising from a study of affiliation and disaffiliation in interaction, addresses an apparently ‘anomalous’ finding in relation to complaint sequences in conversation. In some of the cases we collected in which one speaker was complaining on behalf of the other (their co-participant), taking her side in some matter, the one on whose beh...

It is widely accepted that the audience plays an important role in the co-construction of narratives in conversation, in which the audience is co-author through story-interventions. The audience is not a heterogeneous entity but it may be differentiated in relation to the respective states of knowledge of single parties about the narrative being to...