xGroth 3

• Assessment interview

  The single most important means of data collection to provide context for psychological evaluation
• Without interview data, most psychological test results are meaningless
• Interview


  • Provides potentially valuable information that may be otherwise unobtainable, such as behavioral observations, idiosyncratic features of the client, and the person's reaction to his or her current life situation
  • Is the primary means for developing rapport
• Interview

  Differs from a conversation in that it typically has a clear sequence and is organized around specific, relevant themes, because it is meant to achieve defined goals
• Interview


  • Its general objectives are to gather information that cannot easily be obtained through other means, establish a relationship that is conducive to obtaining the information, develop greater understanding in both the interviewer and interviewee regarding problems, and provide direction and support in helping the interviewee deal with problems
  • The interviewer must have knowledge about the areas to be covered during the interview and direct and control the interaction to achieve specific goals
• Structured interview


  Highly directive and goal oriented, often using structured ratings and checklists
• Unstructured interview


  Allows the participants to freely drift from one area to the next
• Unstructured interviews


  • Offer flexibility, possibly higher rapport, the ability to assess how clients organize their responses, and the potential to explore unique details of a client's history
  • Have received frequent criticism, resulting in widespread distrust of their reliability and validity
• Highly structured and semistructured interviews have been developed that provide sound psychometric qualities, the potential for use in research, and the ability to be administered by less trained personnel
• Goals of any interview


  • Assessing the client's strengths
  • Assessing the client's level of adjustment
  • Assessing the nature and history of the problem
  • Diagnosis
  • Assessing relevant personal and family history
• Techniques for accomplishing interview goals

  • Using at least some structured aids, such as intake forms that provide identifying data and basic elements of history
  • Obtaining information through direct questions on intake forms to free the clinician to investigate other aspects of the client in a more flexible, open-ended manner
  • Using a checklist to help ensure that all relevant areas have been covered
  • Using one of the formally developed structured interviews, such as the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (SADS) or Structured Clinical Interview for the DSM-IV (SCID)
• Regardless of the style used, the interviews all had these common objectives: to obtain a psychological portrait of the person, to conceptualize what is causing the person's current difficulties, to make a diagnosis, and to formulate a treatment plan
• The difficulty with unstructured interviews is that they were (and still are) considered to have questionable reliability, validity, and cost-effectiveness
• The first standardized psychological tests were developed to overcome the limitations of unstructured interviews
• A representative and frequently cited study on interviewer style was reported by W. Snyder (1945), who found that a nondirective approach was most likely to create favorable changes and self-exploration in clients, while a directive style using persuasion, interpretation, and interviewer judgment typically resulted in clients being defensive and resistant to expressing difficulties
• The 1960s (and part of the 1970s) were mostly characterized by a splintering into different schools of conflicting and competing ideologies, with little effort devoted to cross-fertilization and/or integration
• Loftus, 1993) and are likely to be particularly questionable for retrospective reports of psychosocial variables (Garb, 2007; Henry et al., 1994; Piasecki, Hufford, Solhan, & Trull, 2007)
• The even greater challenge to interviewers is to ensure that their interviewing style and method of questioning are not distorting the information derived from clients
• This issue becomes intensely highlighted during interviews to investigate the possibility of childhood sexual abuse (see guidelines in S. White & Edelstein, 1991)
• Further themes in the 1990s and into the millennium were the importance of interview strategies for special populations and the development of new technologies
• It is clear that many diverse populations are more likely to be misdiagnosed. At least in part, this misdiagnosis results in worse outcomes compared with majority groups (Neighbors et al., 2007; Nguyen, Huang, Arganza, & Liao, 2007)
• The potential for misdiagnosis for minority groups demands that clinicians be aware of their own biases, become knowledgeable regarding these subgroups, and make appropriate modifications to their interviews (Ponterotto & Grieger, 2007)
• Several new technologies are both available and becoming progressively more utilized. These include computer-administered interviews (Garb, 2007) as well as data derived from electronic diaries (Piasecki et al., 2007) and ambulatory sensors (Haynes & Yoshioka, 2007) that become a part of clinical interviews
• The themes and issues related to cost-effectiveness, patient–treatment matching, recovered memories, use of new interview technologies, and strategies for interviewing special populations will continue to be important themes throughout the first few decades of the millennium
• Although the interview is not a standardized test, it is a means of collecting data and, as such, can and should be subjected to some of the same types of psychometric considerations as formal tests
• Evaluating the psychometric properties of interviews is important because interviews can introduce numerous sources of bias, particularly if the interviews are relatively unstructured
• Reliability of interviewers is usually discussed in relation to interrater (interviewer) agreement. R. Wagner's (1949) early review of the literature found tremendous variation, ranging from .23 to .97 (Mdn.57) for ratings of personal traits and .20 to .85 (Mdn.53) for ratings of overall ability
• Later reviews have generally found similar variations in interrater agreement (Arvey & Campion, 1982; L. Ulrich & Trumbo, 1965)
• A consistent finding is that, when interviewers were given narrow areas to assess and were trained in interviewer strategies, interrater agreement increased (Dougherty, Ebert, & Callender, 1986; Zedeck, Tziner, & Middlestadt, 1983)
• The consensus is that highly structured interviews were more reliable (Garb, 2007; Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994)
• However, increased structure undermines one of the greatest strengths of interviews—their flexibility. In many situations, a free-form, open-ended approach may be the best way to obtain some types of information
• Research on interview validity has typically focused on various sources of interviewer bias. Halo effects result from the tendency of an interviewer to develop a general impression of a person and then infer other seemingly related characteristics
• Confirmatory bias might occur when an interviewer makes an inference about a client and then directs the interview to elicit information that confirms the original inference
• Physical attractiveness has been found to create interviewer bias in job applicants (Gilmore, Beehr, & Love, 1986)
• In a clinical context, physical attractiveness may result in practitioners either deemphasizing pathology or, on occasion, exaggerating pathology because of discomfort the interviewers may feel over their feelings of attraction (L. Brown, 1990)
• Interviewers also may focus incorrectly on explanations of behavior that emphasize traits rather than situational determinants (Ross, 1977)
• Some specific areas of distortions include victims of automobile accidents typically exaggerating the amount of time they lost from work; 40% of respondents providing overestimates of their contributions to charity; and 17% of respondents reporting their ages incorrectly (R. Kahn & Cannell, 1961)
• Distortions, however subtle, are often found in sensitive areas, such as sexual behavior
• More extreme cases of falsification occur with outright (conscious) lies, delusions, confabulations, and lies by pathological (compulsive) liars that they partially believe themselves (Kerns, 1986)
• Inaccuracies based on retrospective accounts have been found to most likely occur related to psychosocial information (e.g., family conflict, onset of psychiatric symptoms) compared with variables such as change of residence, reading skill, height, and weight (B. Henry et al., 1994)