Title: Lecture Notes
Course: CMM 128 Interviewing Practices > Section: CMM 128 Interviewing Practices

Lecture Notes

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Communication Model
Pictured below is a model of communication.  Beneath this is an explanation of the terms used in the model.

1.  Exigency

If you were taking a psychology class, this part of the model would be called the stimulus that leads a speaker to communication.  Any need or urgency that leads a person to communicate is known as the exigency.  Without an exigency, you would not communicate on a particular subject.  Often the exigency is included in the opening of an interview so the interviewee knows why you want to talk to him or her.  Examples of exigencies include these situations
- You want to hire a new employee so interview several applicants;
- You've hired a new employee and have to train him or her to do the job;
- You're unhappy with some proposed road construction in front of your house and decide to talk to a city engineer about why the work needs to be done and when it will be finished;
- An editor of a newspaper wants you to get a story on the position a candidate for office has on several issues;
- As a doctor, you need to know about a patient's allergies before prescribing medication.

2. The Interviewer (The R)

Also known as the sender, the speaker (e.g., in public speaking), or the encoder, this is the person who takes an idea and forms a message to be sent to the interviewee.

3.   The idea

This is the intended goal or purpose of an interviewer.  An interviewer has a couple options to meet the exigency, some which do not involve communication.  For example, if an interviewer thinks something should be done about trash along the highway, he or she could go out along the highway and pick up trash (no communication involved) or could persuade an other person to get involved in this issue (communication involved).  As another example, a journalist who wants to know a politician's stand on an issue could do research (no communication involved) or could conduct an interview (communication involved).

4.  Encoding
The process of converting an idea into a message is encoding.  The idea can encoded the same as the message or it can be different than the message.  For example, a speaker's message is the opposite of the idea when a speaker uses sarcasm.  Ideas can be encoded into words (a verbal message) or into nonverbal messages.

5.  The message.

The verbal and nonverbal representations of the interviewer's ideas sent to an interviewee are the message.  These include words, gestures, facial expressions, the sound of the speaker's voice, and his or her posture.  Messages have two parts:  the content and the relationship between the sender and the receiver.  Even if the content stays the same, if the relationship between the sender and the receiver is different, the message can have a different effect.  For example, if a parent tells a child, "Go to bed," the message has more power than if it is the other way around and the child tells the parent, "Go to bed."  In the illustration of the model of communication, the message is the convertable and the two passengers in the car are the two parts of the message.
6.  Force

The energy needed to move a message through the channel is the force (fuel).  The force includes the amount of volume in your voice, the energy in your gestures, electrical energy used to send a signal through a phone line, the cost of a postage stamp used to send a letter through the mail.  In the illustration of the model, the gas can represents the force since it is what fuels the car (message).