• Question: What is the most important things you have discovered or found out about what you are researching and why

    Asked by anon-233861 to Phill, Liam, Kohinoor, Karolina, Jack, Debbie on 15 Nov 2019. This question was also asked by anon-233747.
    • Photo: Jack Joyce

      Jack Joyce answered on 15 Nov 2019:

      Hmm… I think the most important thing I’ve found out about is how important language is, and how people actually use language. There’s quite a lot of research that studies ‘language use’ but doesn’t actually look at people using language! (totally bizarre). Instead that research relies on “made up” examples of language, or interviews people to ask them what they think. The research I do counters that work to say “look! we shouldn’t be making stuff up or asking people what they think (because they could lie), instead we should go out into the world and record people talking to each other and then research that!”

      From that work we can then see how people talk about certain things, and more importantly — HOW they talk about things… what are the patterns, and structures of language that people use all the time.

    • Photo: Liam Wignall

      Liam Wignall answered on 16 Nov 2019:

      I found out that people really put a lot of time into the pictures the choose to represent themselves on social media – it’s the first impression people have of us, and we normally like people to like us. this helps to explain why we might take lots of selfies before we get the one we are happy with, and then we will add filters and edit it afterwards. This editing we do on pictures is basically what we do on our online profiles!

    • Photo: Debbie Kinsey

      Debbie Kinsey answered on 17 Nov 2019:

      Good question! I work with people with dementia and people who care for them (who are sometimes their grown-up children, sometimes their wives/husbands, and sometimes paid people). There are lots of things I’m learning in my research, but the main thing is that they want to be included and want other people to listen to them so they can say what they want, what they think is important, and what will help them to be included.

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