Question

Interpersonal Communication: Listening Actively [LO-5] You are planning to study the listening behavior of some of your classmates. Select six classmates and select three situations in which you would like to observe their listening behavior. Referring to the traits of effective listeners in Table 2.3, rate them using always, frequently, occasionally, or never on these listening habits. Does the change in situation have an impact on their active listening behavior? If so, why do you think this might have happened?

Answer 1

Solution:

Let us first consider three different situations we will consider for this question,

1. When a professor is teaching in the classroom.
2. When a student is presenting their case findings.
3. When students are discussing in groups.

We have selected these three different situations because they offer us a new and different insight whenever we measure the changes in the behavior. It can be said that students actively listened to the peer to peer discussion over the professor and student presentation where the students had a lower level of active listening.

The situation that we choose will have a drastic effect on the level of active listening we do. This is because the situation presents us with a scenario where another person is speaking and hence the effectiveness of active listening is closely related to the person delivering the message and hence the effectiveness of active listening behavior also depends on the situational factors.

This happens because we pose different degrees of importance to people around us and thus we focus clearly on the people who we believe have value to deliver to us and hence we listen to them actively. However, we tend to ignore the people we are comfortable with and may sometimes unconsciously neglect what is being said and thus would not engage in active listening. Hence, the situational factors dictate the effectiveness of active listening for individuals.