Politeness, face, and rapport-building in remote and face-to-face investigative interviews with witnesses

Abstract

In guidance issued to police interviewers in England and Wales, the concept of rapport is placed front-and-centre, highlighted as a crucial element of the ‘Engage and Explain’ element of investigative interviews since the PEACE framework was widely adopted in 1993 (see CPTU 1992a, 1992b). Although rapport-building has been shown to be effective, there is little information in the research on what this means in practice – particularly in linguistic terms – and rapport is notoriously difficult to operationalise (Pounds 2019). This paper aims to elucidate the relationship between face work and rapport-building in investigative interviews with witnesses. To do this, a small corpus of recorded mock interviews between a PEACE-trained interviewer and research participants assuming the role of witness to a moderate crime were assembled from a larger set collected as part of a project investigating the efficiency of investigative interviews conducted online as compared to via traditional face-to-face methods. These comparisons are not the subject of this paper; rather, we attempt to map rapport-building strategies evident in the mock interviews onto understandings of face work in interaction.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.3138/ijsll-2024-0032
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics
Funding Information: Authors supported by ESRC grant ES/V015729/1
Additional Information: This accepted manuscript version is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/], which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: investigative interviewing,rapport,face,politeness
Publication ISSN: 1748-8893
Last Modified: 22 Apr 2025 07:14
Date Deposited: 05 Jun 2024 07:25
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://utppubl ... ijsll-2024-0032 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2025-04-04
Accepted Date: 2024-05-21
Authors: MacLeod, Nicci (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-6642-5509)
Oxburgh, Gavin E.
Farrugia, Laura
Walsh, Dave
Nash, Alena

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