4 The importance of rapport
You’ll now move on to explore one of the most important aspects of effective investigative interviewing. This concerns the ability of police officers to build rapport with suspects. Rapport can be tricky to define. Berniero and Gillis (2001, p. 69) provide quite a formal definition: ‘A positive and productive affect between people that facilitates mutuality of attention and harmony’. Alison and Alison (2020, p. 5) refer to it as being when ‘… two people connect or “click” … In other words, rapport occurs when two people “get” each other’.
Rapport is a form of interpersonal behaviour, and you will also learn about a way of representing interpersonal behaviour that is called the interpersonal circle, or to give it its more technical name, the interpersonal circumplex (a circumplex is basically a graph that uses a circular representation).
Circumplex models are often found within psychology because they enable a simple visual circular representation of complex statistical relationships between a lot of different variables. In a circumplex model, variables that are similar are visually represented as being close together, with opposing characteristics displayed at opposite points on the circle. Such circular depictions sound quite complicated when described in the abstract, but as you will discover, are quite simple to grasp when you look at a particular example.
