Throughout Chapter 5 of Hargie 2011, ‘Finding out about others: the skill of questioning’, the important concept of questioning is explored. The main idea of the text is to show that although initially questioning may seem like a simple skill, it is actually a very diverse and complex skill. There are many ideas surrounding questions in the chapter, but the main themes could be described as: what are questions, how we use questions, types of questions and related aspects of questions.
An important issue raised in the article was by Walker, 1999; Zajac et al, 2003; Krahenbuhl and Blades, 2006; Pipe et al, 2007. They said that, “There is a growing volume of research to show that leading questions have a particularly distorting effect upon the responses of children”. For me this idea is an important one, because as student teachers we must be aware that children are much more easily influenced than adults. Leading questions must be used with caution or completely avoided when interviewing children.
There are many arguments made in the text but the one that stands out to me is by Walterman et al (2001:477), they said that, “Asking questions is a fundamental part of communication and as such will be an important factor in the work of many professionals”. I strongly agree with this argument as without questioning, communication in any situation would breakdown.
Though most of the article seems to discuss many relevant issues one thing that I disagreed with was that interactive questions are not effective with large audiences. Although I understand that only a few people would have the opportunity to answer the question, the remaining people would still be thinking about it and listening to other responses would give them a insight into other interpretations of the question. Rhetorical questions are suggested as an alternative to interactive questions, but in my opinion both types of question serve an important purpose but in different ways.
References:
‘Finding out about others: the skill of questioning’, in Hargie, O. (2011) Skilled Interpersonal Communication: Research, Theory and Practice. 5th ed. London: Routledge.
