optometry

Call for Applications: Collaborative PhD Studentship: (King’s Business School/College of Optometrists) (start date: October 2026)

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Blurred Jurisdictions: investigating the professional boundaries in Eye-Care in the UK

King’s Business School (King’s College London), Public Services Management & Organisation & College of Optometrists Collaborative PhD Studentship

King’s College London, in partnership with the College of Optometrists, is offering a PhD studentship to examine how optometrists cooperate with other eyecare and healthcare professionals. This doctoral project thereby investigates how optometrists maintain professional autonomy while navigating complex, multi-professional relationships.

The doctoral student will undertake case studies across diverse settings, including high street and independent practices, hospital eye departments, laser clinics, domiciliary services, and others. They will conduct qualitative interviews with eyecare and healthcare professionals and analyse professional magazines, conference proceedings and scholarly journals in the area of eyecare/health as well as government policy documents and reports related to eye health. The doctoral project will enhance our understanding of the optometry profession and the eyecare/health sector that scholars in management and organisation studies as well as in sociology have rarely investigated.

The student will benefit from being supervised by a team of social scientists based at King’s Business School and optometrists based at the College of Optometrists.

Project Details: The PhD will be supervised by Professor Dirk vom Lehn and Dr Juan Baeza (King’s Business School, PSMO) as well as by Michael Bowen (College of Optometrists).

Collaboration: The studentship is  supported by the Research and Knowledge department at the College of Optometrists , and the student will work closely with and be mentored by College of Optometrists staff. The student will have the opportunity of spending periods of time working at the College of Optometrists offices in London, with access to their Library and Information Services (including the physical specialist and historic library collections) and to the College’s museum and archives.

Qualifications and skills required: Applicants must have a 1st or good 2:1 degree, preferably in a related social science discipline, and must hold a relevant master’s degree, that included a dissertation module.

Applicants will also be required to demonstrate some applied knowledge of qualitative research methodologies, including qualitative interviewing, ethnography, and document analysis. However, when joining the KBS PhD programme the student will receive support and training in both qualitative and quantitative research methods as part of the PhD.

Funding details:  

Stipend – £23,805 (for 2025-26)

Tuition fees –  Full Home and International fees for 2025-26)

Research training & support grant – £1,000 per year

Conference fees and UK fieldwork – £230 each year

Length of award: 4 years (PhD) (3 years full time + 1 year writing up)

Deadline: The closing date for applications is 31 March 2026.  Short-listed applicants can expect to be interviewed within 2 weeks of the closing date.

Further information

You can email Prof Dirk vom Lehn (dirk.vom_lehn@kcl.ac.uk) for an informal discussion about this studentship.

Research Paper on Openings in Optometric Consultations

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As part of the ESRC funded project The Practical Work of the Optometrist Helena Webb, Christian Heath, Dirk vom Lehn, Will Gibson and Bruce Evans have published an article concerned with the opening of optometric consultations in the journal Research on Language and Social Interaction. The paper particularly explored the sensitivity clients display to the use of the word ‘problem’ in the opening questions of the history taking.

The Problem With “Problems”: The Case of Openingsin Optometry Consultations

Abstract

This article contributes to conversation analytic understanding of openings in health-care consulta-tions. It focuses on the case of optometry: a form of health-care practice in which an optometristconducts checks of a patient’s vision and eye health. Patients are advised to attend regularly for rou-tine assessments and can also request a specific appointment at any time. Analysis of a corpus of 66 consultations shows what happens when the optometrist’s opening question solicits the client’s“problems” with their eyes. We find three types of patient response. Patients who have requested aspecific appointment (most often) report a problem with their eyes and establish a problem-purposeencounter. Patients attending for a routinely timed appointment either report no problems and estab-lish a routine-assessment purpose, or if they do have a problem, they delay reporting it or downplay it.We track through what happens subsequently. The findings have practical implications for diagnosisand treatment.

Research Methods paper on Video Transcription in published in the BSA journal Sociology

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As part of the ESR funded project Will Gibson, Helena Webb and Dirk vom Lehn have published a paper that explores new ways in which a reflection on the use of transcript in the examination of video-recorded interaction can aid the analysis.

Analytic Affordance: Transcripts as Conventionalised Systems in Discourse Studies

Abstract

This article explores the role of transcripts in the analysis of social action. Drawing on a study of the interactional processes in optometry consultations, we show how our interest in the rhythm of reading letters from a chart arose serendipitously from our orientation to transcription conventions. We discuss our development of alternative transcription systems, and the affordances of each. We relate this example to constructivist debates in the area of transcription and argue that the issues have been largely characterised in political terms at the expense of a focus on the actual processes of transcription. We show here that analytic affordances emerge through an orientation to professional conventions. The article ends by suggesting that a close reflection on the design of transcripts and on transcription innovation can lead to more nuanced analysis as it puts the researcher in dialogue with the taken for granted ideas embedded in a system.

The article is on Early View at Sociology and with access can be downloaded here.

Posted in U

Aspects of the Subjective Refraction Test (better/worse] #optometry

analysis, Ethnomethodology, interaction, Syllabus, symbolic interactionism, Videoanalysis

Over the past few years, together with comments at the Work, Interaction & Technology Research Centre (Christian Heath and Helena Webb) at KCL, Will Gibson at the Institute of Education and the optometrists Bruce Evans, David Thomson and Peter Allen I worked on research and knowledge exchange projects exploring the practical work of optometrists and developing communications training material. some of the research now has been written up and a few months ago a paper “Engendering Response: Professional Gesture and the Assessment of Eye Sight in Optometry Consultations” was published in Symbolic Interaction. This paper focuses on a particular procedure, the so-called Subjective Refraction that involves optometrist and patient in a sequence of interaction through which some of the characteristics of any corrective lens the patient might need, are determined. Some may recognise the test as the better/worse test as it is characterised by a procedure during which the optometrist alternates a patient’s vision by placing a lens in front of their eye as asking, “better with or without”. Our study here was particularly interested in the practice of placing the lens in front of the patient’s eye, a practice that we described as “professional gesture”. Although not specifically taught in optometric training the optometrists in our research deployed the lens by moving it in a particular way in front of the patient’s eye. The gestural movement of the lens in front of the patient’s eye followed almost exactly the same route through the air in all consultations that we filmed.  Our analysis reveals that such a carefully designed gesture is required for the optometrist to be able to arrive at reliable and robust data about the patient’s sight. They need the patient to respond to a series of different stimuli presented in front of them without reflecting about it.

Here is a video-abstract on the YouTube channel of Symbolic Interaction in which the lead author of the paper, Helena Webb, discusses the content of the paper and shows the gesture.