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Book launch: Elicitation Strategies for Interviewing and Field Work

The book 'Elicitation Strategies for Interviewing and Field Work' by Rodney Clarke was launched with an event sponsored through the UOW Global Challenges Program with support from the Challenge Leader, Living Well Longer Professor Lorna Moxham.

About Elicitation Strategies for Interviewing and Field Work

Speaker 1 [00:00:04] My name is Rodney Clark, I'm the author of the book Elicitation Strategies for Interviewing and Field Work. This is a book that's about the art of interviewing from the perspective that you want to communicate with the person that you're interviewing with. And so I use a series of patterns which can be used by the interviewer, to elicit information and experience from an interviewee. And the idea is that you can design the interview using these patterns of communication and you can help understand what the interviewee is saying by listening out for stages in those patterns.

Speaker 2 [00:00:52] This is a really exciting occasion, as I'm sure a lot of you can appreciate, a book is a huge amount of work, and when you're an academic, you've got lots of other things that you could be doing. So to commit to a book and to see it through is really a huge achievement and we're very proud of Rod today, so congratulations.

Speaker 3 [00:01:11] I believe this book, after reading it and thinking about it and even pondering the ways how I could use it in my own practice. I consider it to be a gift to our community.

Speaker 1 [00:01:26] The benefit of the book is that it's quite practical in the sense that you can plan and actually execute an interview, both traditional interview, which is a face to face interview and also what's called a go along interview where you move through a space. Could be you're interviewing somebody that works on a factory floor or maybe who is walking you through their town and they're recounting to you what experiences they've had of that town. So we cover both of these interview types and show how we can plan and execute those interviews using these patterns of communication.

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In 2019, Rodney Clarke published a book on a functional communication-based approach to interviewing that overturned the implicit use of information theory for planning and undertaking traditional static and go-along interviews. The key to developing these new interviewing practices was the identification of language resources that enabled interviewers to plan and ask questions designed to elicit responses from interviewees organised into mutually expected conventional communication patterns called canonical genres. By understanding how to request or elicit various canonical genres, interviewers could more reliably understand if answers were complete, whether the responses needed further elaboration and if so how to ask appropriate follow-on questions to further disambiguate answers.

Clarke, R. J. (2019) Elicitation Strategies for Interview and Fieldwork: Emerging Research and Opportunities, Advances in Linguistics and Communication Studies (ALCS) Series, Research Insights, IGI Global Research, 130pp. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-6344-0

 

Launch Event

A launch event for the book was held on Wednesday 3rd July 12:30-2:30 in the Foyer of Building 6, the SMART Infrastructure Facility at the University of Wollongong (UOW), NSW Australia. The book was launched by Professor Olivera Marjanovic, Professor of Information Systems in the School of Professional Practice & Leadership, Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney. The launch event was sponsored through the UOW Global Challenges Program with support from the Challenge Leader, Living Well Longer Professor Lorna Moxham. The author wishes to thank Professor Marjanovic, Professor Randle and Professor Moxham for their energy and enthusiasm, support, time and best wishes.

 

Video Resources

A lecture on this topic was given to the Centre for Responsible Organisations and Practices (CROP) on Tuesday 9th April 2019. The talk was entitled Elicitation Strategies for Interviewing and Fieldwork: New Theory and New Methods. A series of videos explaining this approach have been developed from functional communication principles and emphasises the use of commonly available communication patterns called canonical genres.

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