Dr Laura Jenkins

PhD (Loughborough University)

Pronouns: She/her
  • Vice Chancellor Independent Research Fellow

Research groups and centres

Publications
Google Scholar

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

  • Katie Jordin. Title: Learning To Be A Boy - How everyday conversation teaches and upholds heteronormative gender constraints to boys.

Key Publications