This focused on school bullying, with a particular interest in the way that traditional research had isolated pupils and their problematic personalities, rather than seeing them as part of a broader system of relationships, including teachers and parents.
In the years after this she was heavily involved in editing two collections jointly with Sally Wiggins, one a special issue of the journal Discourse and Society and the other a volume for Cambridge University Press, Discursive Research in Practice.
Since 2000 she has been working with a large corpus of phone calls to the UK National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children child protection helpline, originally collected as part of her Leverhulme Fellowship.
Her work focused on the way the calls are opened, the way emotion is expressed and responded to, and the way shared understandings are developed and contested in the course of sequences of advice.
She has become expert in transcription and has developed Gail Jefferson's basic system for transcribing talk to encompass phenomena associated with crying and upset (sobbing, sniffing, tremulous delivery).
[citation needed] In addition to these topics she has been involved in a series of studies of the role of tag questions in interaction.