Sarah Press

Interdisciplinary Relationship Science Program
University of California, Los Angeles


I am broadly interested in interpersonal interaction, and how daily communication patterns shape and enact aspects of more lasting relationships between people. To study interaction, I employ conversation analytic, discourse analytic, and ethnographic methods. My current work studies both the foundation of social interaction, in dyadic conversation, and its implications, in the high school classroom. My Masters thesis will be an examination of the use of "No" at the beginning of an utterance to project incipient agreement or disagreement. I am also working on a video analysis project using data recorded in the first few days of a public high school English class. By capturing the initial interactions between a teacher and her students, I hope to shed light on the ways teachers set expectations and a classroom culture that will last through the whole year. In the future, I plan to continue to work at the intersection of research in education and the interactional enactment of relationships.

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