MacLeod, Nicci, Oxburgh, Gavin E., Farrugia, Laura, Walsh, Dave and Nash, Alena (2025). Politeness, face, and rapport-building in remote and face-to-face investigative interviews with witnesses. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, 31 (2), pp. 187-208.
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 |
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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
(![]() Oxburgh, Gavin E. Farrugia, Laura Walsh, Dave Nash, Alena |