Emma is a Lecturer in Language and Social Interaction in the Communication and Media department in the School of Social Science and Humanities.
Emma completed her PhD here at Loughborough, in 2014. Supervised by Professors Elizabeth Stokoe and Charles Antaki, her thesis ‘The order of ordering: analysing customer bartender service encounters in public bars’ was an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic (CA) study examining how we accomplish service at the bar counter.
Emma joins Loughborough from the Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics, Aston University where her research focussed on understanding the investigative police interview from a CA perspective. She also has an interest in the quality of ‘evidence’ in the legal system in England and Wales. You can read more about Emma’s research interests under the Research tab.
Emma has also held a number of post-doctoral positions working with a range of qualitative research methodologies in health care settings. This included posts at Liverpool University and then Manchester University participating in evaluations of the Care Quality Commission’s inspection and rating regime of health and social care services in England. She also worked on the Preserving Antibiotics Through Safe Stewardship (PASS) project at Leicester University in partnership with colleagues at UCL and the Royal College of Art to understand the social factors contributing to antimicrobial resistance.
Emma’s research interests centre on improving access to criminal justice for 'vulnerable' (as defined by law) victims and witnesses of crimes such as kidnap, domestic violence and sexual offence. She uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine how these crimes are reported and progressed. Her research is applied; working in partnership with police in England she contributes to the development of training and guidance materials and seeks to understand how they are enacted in practice.
- Initial reporting of domestic abuse (IRDA)
Domestic violence has high prevalence but low reporting. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the resulting UK lockdown, saw a media reported increase in reports of domestic abuse to the police and, in greater volume, to domestic abuse charities. In collaboration with Professor Stokoe, at Loughborough University, Emma has been undertaking a conversation analytic study to understand how people make reporting to the police and to see if these initial reports made during the lockdown might differ from those prior to. This work is designed to deal with underreporting and help promote the police services as a route for victims and witnesses of domestic abuse to report incidents of this nature.
- Communicating and recording ‘Crime in Action’: a linguistic analysis
Joanna Traynor, at Anglia Ruskin University, has identified a reluctance by emergency call-handlers to categorize incoming reports as a ‘crime in action’ (crimes such as kidnap and extortion that are ongoing, in real time), due to the immediate and serious response this categorization occasions. Emma is working with Dr Sarah Atkins, Dr Felicity Deamer, both at Aston University, to understand the issues with the reporting and categorization of ‘crime in action’. In this project, they use a combination of linguistics methods to examine how the caller’s spoken report is transformed by call handlers into a written incident log, which dispatch colleagues then either confirm, upgrade or downgrade categorizations and issue responses. The team are particularly interested in analysing patterns that result in miscommunication or miscategorization of ‘crime in action’ incidents, with the potential to contribute to research-based training.
- For the Record: a linguistic analysis of transcribed investigative interviews
Transcripts of investigative interviews are routinely presented in court as part of the prosecution case, with minimal recognition of how original spoken data are (necessarily) substantially altered through the process of being converted into a written format. ‘For the Record’, led by Dr Kate Haworth and with Drs James Tompkinson and Felicity Deamer (Aston University) is a collaborative, mixed-method project being undertaken with an English police force. Emma’s role is this project is to show how the social actions being performed by speakers in the spoken talk are altered in the production of the written transcripts, using conversation analysis. The intended outcome is to produce recommendations, guidelines and (ultimately) training to assist audio transcribers in producing written records which encapsulate more of the meaning conveyed by the original spoken interaction, and to do this consistently.
Emma is the Module Leader for Self and Identity.
Transcription practices
- Richardson, E., Hamann, M., Tompkinson, J., Haworth, K. & Deamer, F. (2023). Understanding the role of transcription in evidential consistency of police interview records in England and Wales. Language in Society.
- Tompkinson, J., Haworth, K., Deamer, F. & Richardson, E. (2023). Perceptual instability in police interview records. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 30(1), 22–51.
- Richardson, E. (2021, March, 17th). Who uses transcriptions of conversations as formal evidence? [Guest Blog]. Research on Language and Social Interaction.
- Richardson, E., Haworth, K., & Deamer, F. (2022). For the Record: Questioning transcription processes in legal contexts. Applied Linguistics, 43(4), 677-697.
- Deamer, F., Richardson, E., Basu, N., & Haworth, K. (2022). For the Record: Exploring variability in interpretations of police investigative interviews. Language and Law / Linguagem e Direito, 9(1), 25-46.
Gender-based violence
- Richardson, E. (2023, May 12th). CRCC supports research to improve evidence-gathering when reporting domestic and sexual violence to the police. [Guest Blog]. Centre for Research on Communication and Culture.
- Stokoe, E. & Richardson, E. (2023). Asking for help without asking for help: How victims request and police offer assistance in cases of domestic violence when perpetrators are potentially co-present. Discourse Studies, 25(3), 383-408.
- Richardson, E. (2021, February, 25th). Mind the gap: why we need to understand the under-reporting of domestic violence to the police. [Guest Blog]. Aston Angle.
- Richardson, E. (2021, January, 13th). How pub-talk research is helping abuse victims tell their stories. [Audio podcast]. Society Matters.
- Stokoe, E., Antaki, C., Richardson, E., & Willott, S. (2020). When Police Interview Victims of Sexual Assault: Comparing Written Guidance to Interactional Practice. In M. Mason, & F. Rock (Eds.), The Discourse of Police Interviews. University of Chicago Press.
- Richardson, E., Stokoe, E., & Antaki, C. (2019). Establishing intellectually impaired victims’ understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘lies’: Police interview guidance and practice in cases of sexual assault. Applied Linguistics, 40(5), 773–792.
- Antaki, C., Richardson, E., Stokoe, E., & Willott, S. (2015). Can people with intellectual disability resist implications of fault when police question their allegations of sexual assault and rape? American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 53(5), 346-357.
- Antaki, C., Richardson, E., Stokoe, E., & Willott, S. (2015). Dealing with the distress of people with intellectual disabilities reporting sexual assault and rape. Discourse Studies, 17(4), 415-432.
- Antaki, C., Richardson, E., Stokoe, E., & Willott, S. (2015). Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: Probing inconsistency and questioning conduct. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 19(3), 328-350.
Membership categorisation analysis of online data
- Meredith, J., Richardson, E. Kent, A., &Budds, K. (2022). Designing qualitative research for working with online newspaper comments. In U, Flick (ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Design. London: SAGE.
- Meredith, J., & Richardson, E. (2019). The use of the political categories of Brexiter and Remainer in online comments about the EU referendum. Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 29(1), 43-55.
- Meredith, J. M. & Richardson, E. (2019, August, 26th). Categories, stereotypes, and political identities: The use of Brexiter and Remainer in online comments. [Guest Blog]. LSE Blog.