29A interview

The interview encompasses many of the elements of all two-person communication.

It is: "a process of dyadic, relational communication with a predetermined and serious purpose designed to interchange behavior and involving the asking and answering of questions".

Whatever his or her objectives, the interviewer may use one of two approaches: standardized or unstandardized. The standardized interview consists of a set of prepared questions from which the interviewer is not allowed to deviate. The unstandardized interview allows the interviewer as well as the respon­dent considerable latitude.

Structure of interview

1. Opening of the Interview

In beginning an interview, an interviewer has three basic responsibilities. The first is to introduce the objectives of the interview to the respondent. A second task for the interviewer is to get the respondent feel that the interviewer can be trusted and that the meeting does not present a threatening situation. The interviewer's third and most impor­tant responsibility is motivating the respondent to answer questions.

2. Body of the Interview

The body of the interview constitutes the major portion of time spent with the respondent, and it should be carefully planned for best results.

3. Conclusion

The possibility of an unpleasant or at least an unsatisfying conclusion points to the importance of skillfully terminating the interview. Interviews often end abruptly because of a lack of time, and both parties are left feeling the need for closure, or resolution.

A number of different types of questions can be used in an interview.

The open question resembles an essay question on a test; it places no restrictions on the length of the respondent's answer.

The closed question is more specific and usually requires a shorter, more direct answer.

Primary questions introduce a new topic in the interview. A very different type of question is called a probe or secondary questions early in the interview to get the respondent to relax and reveal more personal information.

A more volatile and often annoying type of leading question is the loaded ques­tion, which stacks the deck by implying the desired answer. This form of the closed question is sometimes used to back the respondent into a corner.

Suspect Questions. These are the questions that are lawful relate specifically to the job, attitudes about work, health if relevant to the particular work, past employment, educational background and capabilities.

17b Directives are utterances used to try

to get hearer to do smth. They express what the speaker wants.

In order for directives/requests for action to be heard and interpreted as legitimate, they must satisfy certain felicity conditions (Gordon and Lakoff 1971:64):

- Speaker wants hearer to do act.

- Speaker assumes hearer is able to do act.

- Speaker assumes hearer is willing to do act.

- Speaker assumes hearer would not do act in the absence of the request.

Largely because of the demand directives place on the addressee, and because of the fact that they can be realized by a variety of syntactic forms, the choice of directive type can express a great deal about the social context of discourse and the relative status of the interlocutors, e.g. their age, sex, occupation, and familiarity (Ervin-Tripp, 1976)

Directives can be oriented to various elements of the request matrix:

- Hearer-oriented: Could you help me?

- Speaker-oriented: Do you think I could borrow your book?

- Speaker and hearer-oriented: Could we please clean up?

- Impersonal: It might be a good idea to get it done.

Directives can be mitigated through various types of linguistic devices:

Syntactic mitigation:

1. Interrogative

2. Negation

3. Past tense

4. Embedded

Pragmatic mitigation:

5. Consultative devices

6. Understaters

7. Hedges (avoiding commitment)

8. Downtoner (signaling possibility or noncompliance):

25b Directives are utterances used to try

to get hearer to do smth. They express what the speaker wants.

In order for directives/requests for action to be heard and interpreted as legitimate, they must satisfy certain felicity conditions (Gordon and Lakoff 1971:64):

- Speaker wants hearer to do act.

- Speaker assumes hearer is able to do act.

- Speaker assumes hearer is willing to do act.

- Speaker assumes hearer would not do act in the absence of the request.

Largely because of the demand directives place on the addressee, and because of the fact that they can be realized by a variety of syntactic forms, the choice of directive type can express a great deal about the social context of discourse and the relative status of the interlocutors, e.g. their age, sex, occupation, and familiarity (Ervin-Tripp, 1976)

Directives can be oriented to various elements of the request matrix:

- Hearer-oriented: Could you help me?

- Speaker-oriented: Do you think I could borrow your book?

- Speaker and hearer-oriented: Could we please clean up?

- Impersonal: It might be a good idea to get it done.

Directives can be mitigated through various types of linguistic devices:

Syntactic mitigation:

9. Interrogative

10. Negation

11. Past tense

12. Embedded

Pragmatic mitigation:

13. Consultative devices

14. Understaters

15. Hedges (avoiding commitment)

16. Downtoner (signaling possibility or noncompliance):

12 b Scripts

In everyday life our ability to arrive automatically at interpretations of the unwritten or unsaid must be based on preexisting knowledge or knowledge structures. These structures function like familiar patterns from previous experiences that we use to interpret new experiences. The most general term for pattern of this type is scheme. A scheme is a preexisting structure in memory. If there is a fixed static pattern to the scheme it is sometimes called a frame. A frame shared by everyone within a social group is smth like a typical version. For ex., within a frame for selling goods, there’ll be such assumed items as sellers, customers, certain goods, possible intermediares, transport means.

When more dynamic types of schemes are considered they are very oftaen described as scripts. A script is a preexisting knowledge structure involving event sequence with use scripts to build interpretation of accounts or report or what happened. Schrank has attempted to characterize the knowledge that people have of the structure of stereotypic events sequences of various kinds. He was the first to use term “script” to represent this knowledge.

In everyday life people have many goals. To fulfil them we design a plane that might involve a different number of actions. Within a script one can distinguish goals, actions and prompts.