Chapter 4: Interviewing & Observing

Question 1

Interview

Answer 1

Conversation with a purpose or goal

Question 2

Useful in Clinical Situations

Answer 2

Easy means of communicating; convenient context for attempting to help them; inexpensive’ provide the clinician with simultaneous samples of clients’ veral and nonverbal behavior

Question 3

Intake Interviews

Answer 3

Designed maily to establish the nature of the problem; used to develop broader descriptions of clients and the environmental context in which their behavior occurs; lays the groundwork for subsequent therapy efforts by establishing a productive working relationship and organizing the clinician’s hypotheses about origins and development of the client’s problems

Question 4

Mental Status Examination (MSE)

Answer 4

Planned sequence of questions designed to assess a client’s basic mental functioning in a number of important areas; analogous to the physical examination that makes up part of the assessment of medical problems

Question 5

Problem-Referral Interviews

Answer 5

Interviews conducted after a client is referred in order to answer a specific question; central goal is to address the referral question

Question 6

Orientation Interviews

Answer 6

Special interviews to acquaint the client with the assessment, treatment, or research procedures to come

Question 7

Termination Interview

Answer 7

Interview that occurs when it is time to terminate the clinical relationship; can help alleviate clients’ anxiety about the assessment enterprise by explaining the procedures and protections involved in transmission of privileged information and by providing a summary and interpretation of the assessment results

Question 8

Debriefings

Answer 8

Terminations following clinical research

Question 9

Crisis Interviews

Answer 9

Attempt to provide suppport, collect assessment data, and provide help, all in a very short time; ask relevant questions;

Question 10

Nondirective Interviews

Answer 10

Uses direct questions sparingly and relies instead on responses designed to facilitate the client’s talking about his or her concerns

Question 11

Semi-structured Interviews

Answer 11

An organized set of topics is explored in a way that gives the interviewer flexibility in wording questions, interpreting answers, and guiding decisions about what to address next

Question 12

Structured Interviews

Answer 12

Do not outlaw open-ended questions or prohibit interviewers from formulating their own questions to clarify ambiguous responses, they do provide detailed rules (decision trees or branching rules) that tell the interviewer what to do in certain situations

Question 13

Sources of Error in Clinical Interviewing

Answer 13

Patient Variance
Information Variance
Criterion Variance

Question 14

Patient Variance

Answer 14

Occurs when the same patient provides different answers or displays different behaviors in response to the same questions asked by different clinicians

Question 15

Information Variance

Answer 15

Refers to differences in the way clinicians ask questions or make observations

Question 16

Criterion Variance

Answer 16

Refers to disagreements that occur if clinicians apply different standards of judgment to the same set of client responses

Question 17

Stages in the Interview

Answer 17

Beginning the Interview
The Middle of the Interview
Closing the Interview

Question 18

Important things to Consider

Answer 18

The Setting needs to be comfortalbe, private, and can aid rapport
The Opening - Important because clients may not be ready to talk candidly about personal matters
Frame Setting & Transition - Explain to the client the basic ground rules for theinteraction

Question 19

Frame Setting

Answer 19

Frame refers to the norms and expectations that surround an interview, consultation, or therapy session; clarifies time boundaries for the interview session, expresses expectation about what will be covered and what basic roles participants will take, and briefly introduces the idea of a structure; provides assurances of confidentiality as well as its limits and conveys information about the interviewer’s commitment

Question 20

Active listening

Answer 20

Involves responding to the client’s speech in ways that indicate understanding and encourage further elaboration

Question 21

Paraphrasing

Answer 21

Clinicians restate what their clients say in order to show they are listening closely and give the clients a chance to correct the remark if it was misinterpreted

Question 22

Reflection

Answer 22

Highlighting the client feelings

Question 23

Repeated Scanning & Focusing

Answer 23

Interviewers first scan a topic nondirectively, then focus on it in more directive fashion

Question 24

Closing the Interview

Answer 24

Provide valuable assessment data and opportunity to enhance rapport; Accomplish (1) impending conclusion of the interview is signaled (frame setting) (2) client is praised for cooperativeness and reassured that the clinician recognized how stressful the interview was (emotional support) (3) The suggested plan for the final minutes invites the client to ask questions or make comments that may be important but not had not been put into words

Question 25

Communication in the Interview

Answer 25

Fundamental objective is to encode, transmit, and decode messages accurately;

Question 26

Nonverbal Communication

Answer 26

Remains open even when the verbal channel shuts down; clinicians must be sensitive not only to incoming signals but also to those they transmit; must be coordinated with verbal behavior;

Question 27

Channels of Nonverbal Communications

Answer 27

Physical Appearance
Movements
Posture
Eye Contact
Facial Expressions
Emotional Arousal
Speech Variables

Question 28

Carl Rogers

Answer 28

Publish first transcripts from phonographic recordings of therapy interviews

Question 29

Reliability of Interview Data

Answer 29

Examined the consistency of clients’ responses across repeated interview occasions; measures test-retest reliability; Degree to which different judges agree on the inferences (ratings, diagnoses, or personality trait descriptions) measures interrater reliability

Question 30

Useful Research Strategy for Interview Data

Answer 30

Have several clinicians view videotaped interviews and then make ratings or draw other inferences from the tapes;

Question 31

Test-Retest Reliability of Interviews

Answer 31

Tends to be highest when the interval between interviews is short and when adult clients are asked for innocuous information such as age and other demographic data

Question 32

Validity of Interviews

Answer 32

Established by including all of the relevant aspects of a target domain (content validity), b comparing interview results with other valid measures of the same concept (concurrent validity), or by an interview’s ability to predict expected future outcomes (predictive validity)

Question 33

External Criterion

Answer 33

Gold standard; used as the standard against which interview conclusions are measured

Question 34

Convergent Validity

Answer 34

When instruments correlate with several conceptually similar indices

Question 35

Discriminant Validity

Answer 35

When instruments are uncorrelated with measures of conceptually different phenomena

Question 36

Probability of Error or Distortion

Answer 36

Increases when clients are mentally retarded, suffer from various brain disorders, or would prefer not to reveal the truth about their behavior problems, drug use, sexual behavior, criminal activity, or previous hospitalizations

Question 37

Impression Management

Answer 37

The desire to present oneself in a particular light to a mental health professional

Question 38

Observational Data

Answer 38

likely to provide more valid information in special situations;

Question 39

Observational Methods

Answer 39

Defined as the selection, provocation, recording, and encoding of behaviors;

Question 40

Naturalistic Observations

Answer 40

Hospital and Clinic Observations
School Observations
Home Observations
Self-Observation
Observation by Insiders

Question 41

Controlled Observation (Analog Behavior Observation, Situation tests, and Contrived Observation)

Answer 41

Set up special circumstances under which clients can be observed as they react to planned, standardized events

Question 42

Types of Controlled Observation

Answer 42

Performance Measures
Role-Playing Tests
Physiological Neaures
Virtual Reality Assessment
Behavioral Avoidance Tests

Question 43

Factors Important to Interrater reliability

Answer 43

Task complexity

Rater Training