The Interview Question

About the Interview

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term interview originates from the French word entre voir (meaning “to be in sight of”), which refers to a face-to-face meeting. By the end of the 19th century and the rise of modern journalism, the term interview came to have a different and more current meaning. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary in 1913 defined an interview as “a conversation, or questioning, for the purpose of eliciting information for publication” and of “recent use, originating in American newspapers, but apparently becoming general” (p. 781). Later on, many dictionaries, such as the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners and the Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary, followed Webster's definition that “interview is a meeting in which someone asks another person, especially a famous person, questions about themselves, their work, or their ideas, in order to publish or broadcast the information” (Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 2003, p. 753). More specifically, Wikipedia (n.d.) defines an interview as “a conversation between two or more people (the interviewer and the interviewee) where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interviewee.” According to their functions and methods, interviews can be classified as job interviews, case interviews, news interviews, telephone interviews, mall-intercept personal interviews, and so on.

From the above definitions, one can discern these common features of interviews:

• 1.
  An interview is a goal- or task-oriented talk to gather information, in which the interviewer and the interviewee have their respective roles to play.
• 2.
  The interviewer acts in the role of questioning and the interviewee in the role of answering.
• 3.
  The question-answer sequence is the predominant sequential structure in an interview.
• 4.
  The interviewer is empowered to ask questions, and the interviewee is confined to responding.

These features of the interview conform to the description of institutional dialogue by many scholars, such as Drew and Heritage (1992), who hold that institutional dialogue is goal oriented, involving constraints of different degrees and associated with an inferential framework under special institutional contexts. Similarly, Thornborrow (2002) identifies institutional dialogue as “talk which sets up positions for people to talk from and restricts some speakers' access to certain kinds of discursive actions” and also “a form of interaction in which the relationship between a participant's current institutional role and their current discursive role emerges as a local phenomenon which shapes the organization and trajectory of the talk” (pp. 4–5).

Institutional talk can be described as characteristically asymmetrical (Drew & Heritage, 1992). In fact, such asymmetry depends on unequal turn allocation between participants and unequal distribution of social power and status (Habermas, 1984). Therefore, institutional asymmetry implies both the asymmetry of the overall structural organization and the asymmetry of right and obligation or power and status. According to Wang (2006), “The institutional asymmetry of the overall structural organization often concerns the sequence organization and the turn-taking system. The most distinctive and dominant sequence in institutional dialogue is the questions/answer sequence when an interaction proceeds” (p. 540).

As questions constitute a crucial speech act in an interview, the definition and the classification of questions will be introduced in the following section.

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