This weeks lecture and readings were all cannon fodder to really think about the nature of interviews, and how in a way the interviewer and the relevant parties usually have all of the power, in the way that they are the ones that ask the questions, and in that sense in their decision of how many open questions or closed questions they choose to ask, there is really not much the interviewee can do to alter the scenario without risking losing face.

They also are on top of the choice of setting, or at the very least the party that chooses the setting has quite a powerful choice, since it can sometimes be geared to elicit some sort of response. Like for instance some thing I thought about when prompted by the setting was the Stephen Dank interview on Channel 7 a few years back during the Essendon Drug Saga where it seemed like the room was dimly lit, on top of being rather heated up, leading to a sweaty looking Dank, to simply, through the setting alone paint him has a nervous and obviously guilty man (that said I don’t want to talk about it…)

I struggle to think of many scenarios where the interviewer is even in view, like apart from the candid interview master Louis Theroux, where it is pretty true that his “pressure and reactions” are integral to the exchange, so much so it’s almost unfathomable to picture Louis not in the frame when he is getting so much out of his subjects.

He would almost be the pinnacle of “mastering the interviewing process”, and I can’t even pin it in my mind to any one thing he employs in his interviewing.