Linguistic Profiling
for Professionals

 Communicating with vulnerable people

As part of our Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Browne Jacobson, we are working with organisations to improve the inclusivity of their communications. This involves reviewing how organisations engage with people who might be vulnerable for any reason, including related to protected characteristics (such as age, disability, gender), level of education, addiction, proficiency in English, inexperience carrying out certain activities or their financial situation.

Yellow speech bubble containing screwed up paper as dots
 

Regulators, such as the Financial Conduct Authority, the Social Housing Regulator, Ofcom, Ofgem and the Office for Students, are increasingly stepping in to ensure that organisations meet their duties to communicate clearly and effectively with consumers and customers. Organisations are also keen to ensure that they are not unconsciously excluding, or disadvantaging, people from marginalised groups. 

We are collaborating with organisations to perform linguistic reviews of their websites, informational materials and external communications. Our innovative approach combines techniques from discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and multimodal analysis to provide rich insights into their communicative style.

Organisations will be provided with a report which profiles the inclusivity of their communications, identifying good practice and areas for potential improvement. We are also working together to develop best practice guidance applicable across multiple sectors. This has the potential to benefit hundreds of thousands of vulnerable service users.

Linguistic Profiling for Professionals

Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics
The University of Nottingham
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

telephone:+44 (0) 115 748 6360
fax: +44 (0) 115 951 5924
email: lipp@nottingham.ac.uk