Attending to child agency in paediatric palliative care consultations: Adults' use of tag questions directed to the child.

Children's agency in their own lives is increasingly recognised as important, including within paediatric health care. The issue of acknowledging child agency is complex in the context of paediatric palliative care, where children have serious and complex conditions that often impact their ability to verbally communicate with others. This study explores how clinicians and parents/guardians direct talk towards a child patient when they are present in a consultation.

Discussing death: Making end of life implicit or explicit in paediatric palliative care consultations.

Objective: To consider whether and how family members and clinicians discuss end of life during paediatric palliative care consultations.

Methods: Nine naturally occurring paediatric palliative care consultations were video recorded and analysed using conversation analytic methods.

Analysis: Focusing on three consultations in which end of life was treated as a certain outcome, analysis explored ways in which end of life was made either implicit or explicit within these consultations.

Cues to deception in context: response latency/gaps in denials and blame shifting.

Over 40 years of work on lying in psychology and communication has investigated numerous 'cues to deception'- the subtle signals people show when they are lying. One of these cues to deception is 'response latency' or the gap that occurs between questions and the lying response. The current investigation uses the methodology of conversation analysis to re-consider the question of response latency in the context of lying.