Investigations

In the first two parts of this series on thoughts and gestures in interviewing, we looked at gestures that occur in combination with spoken words. These gestures are also sometimes called illustrators as they help the speaker add meaning and context to the words spoken. There are other physical movements people make that are not done to support the actual spoken language. In part 3 we discuss pantomimes, emblems, and adaptors.

Sometimes old habits die hard. In fact, on many occasions, they refuse to die on their own, so they must be dealt with from...

We discussed some of the geographic differences when using gestures in other cultures in our last column. We also touched on the differences between...

My husband Wayne and I have been sharing a lot of sad, knowing looks lately. You see, our son Greg, just graduated from high...

The great thing about the enticement question is that we can use it regardless of whether we have any evidence. The wording of the question thus becomes very important.

Employee theft is a major problem for many employers in the United States, coming in at number two on the list of leading causes of inventory shrinkage (behind shoplifting/ORC), according to the 2018 National Retail Security Survey.

A common question that comes up in training seminars is: "How the heck do we get that written statement?"

In situations where a subject reverts to “I don’t remember,” it is generally a means of defending himself without having to admit to participation in a particular act.

With each topic that you introduce, there might be a little bit of resistance. What do we need to do to decrease resistance? Build more credibility, show understanding, and eventually lead to another assumptive question.

The participatory approach is specifically used when there’s circumstantial evidence or that there’s a possibility that your subject might have an excuse, an explanation, so some type of alibi that may or may not be true.