Educing Information: Interrogation - National Intelligence University

communications, discourse analysis, persuasive message production/analysis,
and negotiation theory.
Communications Models
Educing and providing information, at the most basic level, involve a process
of communication. Since the 1940s researchers have been working to develop
a comprehensive model of the communication process. While communications
models cannot fully capture all key elements of information eduction, they offer
some useful concepts and frameworks. First, they both identify and label the
key components in a communication encounter (e.g., sender, message, medium,
receiver). Second, they array these components in the framework of a dynamic
process in which they interact with one another. Third, the transactive model in
particular emphasizes the centrality of “fields of experience” that both source
and receiver bring to the encounter and that surround the overarching process. In
educing information, cultural factors and differences in experiences are critical
to understanding how to bridge the gap between the intended and received
message.
Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis, a subdiscipline of linguistics, offers a narrower analytic
framework. Its focus is strictly on discourse; that is, patterns of verbal or textual
exchange. Stubbs (1983), one of the early and leading scholars of discourse
analysis, defines the discipline as:
the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected speech
or written discourse. Roughly speaking, it refers to attempts to
study the organisation of language above the sentence or above
the clause, and therefore to study larger linguistic units, such
as conversational exchanges or written texts. It follows that
discourse analysis is also concerned with language use in social
contexts, and in particular with interaction or dialogue between
speakers. (Stubbs, 1983, 1; for this and other references, see
bibliography at the end of this essay)
Persuasive Message Production/Analysis
Stephen Wilson coined the term “persuasive message production” to describe
a subdiscipline of study that integrates research on gaining compliance with
theories of message production. He poses as its central question: “When we want
to convince another person to do something, why do we say what we do”
Negotiation Theory
Theories and models of negotiation offer some useful concepts and
terminology to describe the process by which people with apparently divergent
“positions” interact. Two of its most important aspects are the explicit emphasis
on understanding strategy rather than just tactics, and the distinction between
negotiation or influence interactions based on “positions” versus those based
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