rough draft short analysis

Sarah Brittain March 2013 Rough draft Short Analysis Question: how can language be used to create a comfortable and safe place, so an interviewer can get the best information possible. INTRO: there are many “moves” an interviewer can make in order to create a comfortable atmosphere. This helps the person they’re interviewing feel more at ease with the conversation, and therefore more likely to talk back. Certain language features help the conversation along and help the interviewer obtain good information. To prove this I will be analyzing two documented interviews both done by Dr. Sally Chandler. The two interviews are about very different topics and with different people, male and female. In these interviews, Dr. Chandler uses her knowledge of language use to make her interviewee feel more comfortable. The first document is an interview with a girl about the internet and how it affected her childhood. At first the girl seems nervous; she spills an answer to the first question and hesitates as if she said too much. The first thing Dr. Chandler does is ask another question pertaining to the first story told, “what did that experience do?”. The same way a psychologist gets a patient to unveil secrets, an interviewer must unlock information from the person through a series of questioning. This statement allows the girl to talk about it more and reveal what happened to her. This helps out in a great way because it makes the girl feel more comfortable, she then begins to talk more in depth about her original story. The girl still has more information to tell, another move made by Dr. Chandler is the simple act of agreeing and responding. She agrees with the statement the girl makes about how the internet can be dangerous, this act of agreeing with the interviewee helps the girl realize that she is in no way being judged. Dr. Chandler then commends the girl, “but you figured that out, you knew to hang up when you got the call”. Agreeing with the girl’s statements as well as commending her for her actions creates a level of comfort so the girl continued revealing information about what had happened, going in to further detail. Dr. Chandler continues to laugh with the girl in this comfortable environment and acquires another story about her use of the internet. Laughing creates a level of comfort that enables the person talking to feel more at ease. Dr. Chandler tells the girl that her story is “very funny” twice, to emphasize that she is not being judged at all and can continue with her stories about the internet use. This comfortable environment helps the interviewer out a lot, not just in getting answers to certain questions but also in having an interviewee return allowing you to ask more detailed questions. Dr. Chandler makes very similar language moves in her second interview with a boy about computer games. This interview is much shorter but Dr. Chandler makes different moves. She edges the boy on in a sense, to help him feel more at ease with the topic of discussion, games as a sort of software. Just as before, when the conversation first starts the boy seems nervous. Dr. Chandler resorts to commending him, telling him that he knows “lots of software”. Even still this interviewee is harder to make comfortable, he resists fully answering her questions saying he knows “what everyone else knows”. Dr. Chandler helps this situation by talking back to him and suggesting that he come up with his own specific “background” in computer software. This allows the boy to answer based on his own knowledge, knowing theres no right or wrong answer helps him feel more comfortable. He then starts giving her longer answers to her questions. Dr. Chandler has to continue to edge him on by telling him there is a connection between the games he plays and the software programs, but she insists that he finds those connections himself. By making this suggestion she is helping him see through this complex puzzle. She then makes another suggestion which helps his comfort level ad allows him to come to many conclusions on his own. It’s important for the person being interviewed to feel comfortable that way more detailed information is revealed. The moves made by Dr. Chandler helped create this level of comfort that enabled her to obtain the best information possible form her interviews. It’s not so important to maintain control during an interviewer. Whatever questions the interviewer had originally written down may never even be asked, it all depends on the person being interviewed and how comfortable they are.