Professor Elizabeth Stokoe
Elizabeth Stokoe is a Professor in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science.
What is your area of expertise, and how did your interest for this area come about?
I’m a psychologist by background, and my area of expertise is in conversation analysis – the study of human social interaction “in the wild”. Although psychologists are often characterized as “professional people watchers”, it is true that, across the range of psychological tools and methods, the observation of naturally occurring moment-to-moment talk and embodied conduct has not figured prominently. Conversation analysis (CA) is both a method for recording (audio and video, including 360-degree cameras and even VR!), transcribing, and analysing social interaction and a theory of human sociality. CA was brought into psychology via discursive psychology, but its origins are in sociology, and much of its development has been in linguistics. This inter- and multidisciplinary trajectory means that conversation analysts work across the social sciences and humanities, with applied work across computer science, business, and medicine. I was introduced to the method by my wonderful PhD supervisor, Dr Eunice Fisher, and it was completely new to me. My undergraduate psychology degree was pretty traditional in terms of methodology so I learned statistics and experimental approaches more than anything else. While conversation analysis isn’t readily categorizable as either qualitative or quantitative, either way its sociological origins can mean it is rarely included in undergraduate psychology training.
What research projects are you currently working on?
My work is quite diverse in scale and focus. I’m currently finishing a book on Categories in Social Interaction (with Geoff Raymond and Kevin Whitehead from the Dept of Sociology and UCSB), which is about how people categorize themselves and each other – and resist, challenge, embrace those categorizations – in talk and text of all kinds. The book focuses a great deal on ‘isms’ and the incredibly subtle as well as blatant ways in which power, prejudice, and inclusion/exclusion are made manifest in the details of social interaction. I’ve also started work on another quite different book, on Conversation Analysis for Conversation Design (with Saul Albert, Loughborough University, and Cathy Pearl, Google), which aims to combine academic and industry expertise together for those designing or studying conversational user interfaces or human-computer interaction. Last year, I co-authored a book on crisis communication (with Rein Ove Sikveland and Heidi Kevoe-Feldman), which was the culmination of a longer project working with police crisis negotiators to analyse recordings made at the scene of the incredibly high stakes conversations that happen with suicidal persons in crisis. We were able to identify core communicative practices - never previously been described or shared – that built the interactional foundations of a safe outcome. Some of these things were very surprising, such as when negotiators asked persons in crisis to ‘talk’ or suggested talking as an activity (without which, of course, there is no negotiation!), the latter resisted engaging. However, when negotiators asked persons in crisis to ‘speak’ or suggested speaking as an activity, they encountered far less resistance and the negotiation made progress.
What wider impact would you like your research to have on the world?
Much of my research has been in applied settings (e.g., sales, police negotiation, mediation, the tech industry, healthcare and medicine) and, especially in the last 10-15 years, focused on identifying (in)effective communicative practices and using research findings to develop an evidence-based training method for practitioners. I developed CARM, which won a Wired Innovation Fellowship in 2015, and went on to underpin two impact case studies for the Research Excellence Framework, including a top-scoring case in REF2021. The case study explains the different kinds of impacts that beneficiaries have reported having engaged with conversation analytic research and training, from improved outcomes in crisis negotiation to increased sales conversion rates during cold-calling. Because I have been lucky to have the opportunity to speak about my research to lots of different audiences over the years (e.g., BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, a TEDx talk, at The Royal Institution, various science festivals), and write a ‘popular science’ book about conversation analysis, I’ve created strong pathways to impact via engagement and collaboration with many industry partners. Now, for the new book on Conversation Analysis for Conversation Design, me and my co-authors are test-driving each of the book’s chapters as expert classes for the Conversation Design Institute. I don’t know where this might go next, but I’ve worked as an industry fellow twice, now (at Typeform and Deployed), and thus taken my research directly to the technology sector. I’ve also done a lot of work in research leadership roles supporting the impact and engagement understanding, practicalities, and ambitions of academic colleagues across the disciplinary spectrum.
What are the biggest challenges in your area of study?
I think there are three big challenges for conversation analysts. The first is research access. I have been lucky in recent years to work with organizations who have granted access to recordings, many of whom already record parts of the daily life of the workplace, from police interviews to call centres and, of course, almost any customer or telehealth services (“your call may be recorded for quality, training, etc., purposes”). However, for my first big project following my PhD (for which I video-recorded university students working in groups in seminar settings) which sought to understand the causes of and solutions to neighbour disputes, I spent months negotiating access to settings. It was very difficult: many parties are more comfortable with being interviewed or completing a survey, or even just being observed while fieldnotes are taken, than being recorded. In the end, I managed to collect large datasets of neighbour mediations, inquiry calls to mediation services, calls to environmental health services, and police interviews with suspects arrested for a neighbour dispute that had escalated to criminal levels. But, along the way, many organizations said “no”. Those who agreed were hopefully reassured about the purpose of the recordings and the ethical ways in which conversation analysts work with them, including anonymizing them in technical ways. The second challenge for conversation analysis is one of how it is understood by other academics. For example, CA is often caricatured (by other social scientists) for failing to address ‘big questions’ or having ‘no theory’ or focusing on ‘just words.’ None of these things are correct, but they do persist. And the third challenge is somewhat connected to the second – one of perception, this time of the contribution that CA can make to our understanding of human social interaction. Since we all talk and have our lifetime’s experience of communicating with others, people often rely on this ‘anecdata’ to think about how it works. CA has shown not only that people aren’t very good at describing or reflecting on how talk actually works, post hoc, but also that how it works is different to how it is often described in both mainstream and popular psychology. But I quite relish these challenges – they keep things fresh and interesting!
What are your top three tips for early career researchers?
My first tip is to say “yes” to things that are a bit scary or outside your experience so far, like speaking to a different kind of audience or collaborating with academics (or non-academic partners) a long way from your discipline. At the same time, it’s also important to learn how to say “no” and try to maintain a liveable work life where you are not over-burdened. And it’s really important to find someone to talk these kinds of decisions through with, if you find them difficult to judge. The second tip is to follow your nose but work on your sense of smell – for people, projects, opportunities, and things to resist. And the final one is to remember that while academia can be competitive, individualistic, and problematic in many ways, it’s also a place where you will meet wonderful people and make life-long friends. Cherish and be nourished by those people and friends so you can support each other through the ups and downs of academic life.