Interviewing Flashcards
Structured:
printed set of questions, using a standardized interview, all applicants asked same questions in the same sequence
Directive
Selection interview - designed to elicit info pertaining to qualifications and capabilities for particular employment duties
Unstructured interview:
unstandardized, no specific or particular questions in mind and the sequence of questions followed the interviewees statements
Nondirective
Diagnostic interview: emotional functioning rather than qualifications - uncover thoughts, feelings, attitudes that might impede or facilitate competence
The Interview as a test
Resembles a test in many respects
Like a test - method for gathering data or info about an individual - used to describe/make predictions or both
Can be evaluated in terms of standard psychometric qualities such as reliability and validity
Types of interviews
Individually - one to one
Family interview - single interviewer with two or more individuals at the same time
Interviewing important to
Interviewing important to employment and clinical psychiatry, all health-related professions, social work, counselors, parole, researchers, business, attorneys, contractors or architects
Non professional lives: parent questions a group of children
Reciprocal Nature of Interviewing
All interviews involve mutual interaction whereby the participants are interdependent - they influence each other
Study Akehurst and Vrij - transactional or reciprocal nature of the interview process
Criminal suspects observed during interrogation
If one of the participants in the interview increased their activity level, then the activity of the other participant also increased
Reduction in activity by one triggered a reduction in the other
Participants in an interview profoundly affect each other
Second experiment - increased activity from the subject was related to increased suspiciousness on the part of the interrogator
Highly active interrogators increased activity in the suspects which in turn increased the interrogators suspisciousness
Interview participants affect each other’s moods
Heller - when professional actors responded with anger to highly trained experienced interviewers the interviewers became angry and showered anger towards the actors
Social facilitation - act like the models around us
If interviewer wishes to create conditions of openness, warmth and acceptance - have to exhibit these qualities
Principles of Effective Interviewing
Proper Attitudes
More a matter of attitude than skill
Interpersonal influence - degree to which one person can influence another is related to interpersonal attraction - degree to which people share a feeling of understanding, mutual respect, similarity etc.
Attitudes related to good interviewing - warmth, genuineness, acceptance, understanding, openness, honesty and fairness
Principles of Effective Interviewing
Responses to Avoid
Stress interview - the interviewer may deliberately induce discomfort or anxiety in the interviewee
As a rule - making interviewees uncomfortable tends to place them on guard, guarded or anxious interviewees tend to reveal little info about themselves
Determine how well an individual functions in adversity - types of responses that interviewers should avoid might be used in a stress interview
If goal is to elicit as much info as possible or receive a good rating from the interviewee - interviewers should avoid certain responses including judgmental or evaluative statements, probing statements, hostility and false reassurance
Judgmental or evaluative statements -likely to inhibit the interviewee.
Being judgmental means evaluating the thoughts, feelings, or actions of another.- put them on guard because we communicate the message, “I don’t approve of this aspect of you.”- inhibit others’ ease in revealing important information.
Thus, unless the goal of the interview is to determine how a person responds to being evaluated, evaluative or judgmental statements should usually be avoided.
Principles of Effective Interviewing
Avoid Probing statements
demand more information than the interviewee wishes to provide voluntarily. The most common way to phrase a probing statement is to ask a question that begins with “Why?” - tends to place others on the defensive
some circumstances, probes are appropriate and necessary. With children or individuals with disabilities- needs to ask questions to elicit meaningful information
hostile statement directs anger toward the interviewee. Clearly, one should avoid such responses unless one has a specific purpose, such as determining how an interviewee responds to anger.
reassuring statement attempts to comfort or support the interviewee
sometimes appropriate, you should almost always avoid false reassurance. For example, imagine a friend of yours flunks out of college, loses her job, and gets kicked out of her home by her parents. You are lying to this person when you say, “Don’t worry; no problem; it’s okay.”
Effective Responses
One major principle of effective interviewing is keeping the interaction flowing
Except in structured interviews or for a particular purpose, one can effectively initiate the interview process by using an open-ended question - tell me about yourself
- –Open-ended questions give the interviewee wide latitude in choosing the topics that he or she feels are important. Except for highly specific structured interviews, we usually can learn a lot more about people when they tell us what they think is important than when we try to guess by asking a series of closed-ended questions.
—The open-ended question requires the interviewee to produce something spontaneously and the closed-ended question to recall something
A closed-ended question brings the interview to a dead halt, thus violating the principle of keeping the interaction flowing
Responses to Keep the Interaction Flowing
After asking the open-ended question, the interviewer as a rule lets the interviewee respond without interruption; that is, the interviewer remains quiet and listens. Unless the interview is structured, once the interviewee’s response dies down, the interviewer usually responds in a way that will keep the interaction flowing
He or she should use minimum effort to maintain the flow, such as using a transitional phrase such as ‘Yes,” “And,” or “I see.” These phrases imply that the interviewee should continue on the same topic.
Sometimes the transitional phrase fails to have the desired effect. When this occurs, the interviewer should make a response relevant to what has just been communicated
To make such a response, the interviewer may use any of the following types of statements:
verbatim playback, paraphrasing, restatement, summarizing, clarifying, and understanding.
verbatim playback
the interviewer simply repeats the interviewee’s last response
Paraphrasing and restatement responses
interchangeable with the interviewee’s response. A paraphrase tends to be more similar to the interviewee’s response than a restatement, but both capture the meaning of the interviewee’s response
Summarizing and clarification statements
go just beyond the interviewee’s response. In summarizing, the interviewer pulls together the meaning of several interviewee responses.
The clarification statement
as its name implies, serves to clarify the interviewee’s response
Carl Roger’s - effects of client-centred therapy
5 point scoring system - represents a degree of empathy
Level one responses: bear little or no relationship to the interviewee’s response.
Level 2: communicates a superficial awareness of the meaning of a statement. never quite goes beyond his or her own limited perspective. Level-two responses impede the flow of communication.
Level 3: interchangeable with the interviewee’s statement. level three is the minimum level of responding that can help the interviewee. Paraphrasing, verbatim playback, clarification statements, and restatements are all examples of level-three responses.
Level-Four and Level-Five Responses: not only provide accurate empathy but also go beyond the statement given. In a level-four response, the interviewer adds “noticeably” to the interviewee’s response. In a level-five response, the interviewer adds “significantly” to it
The highest degrees of empathy, levels four and five, are relevant primarily for
therapeutic interviews.
Level three represents
various degrees of true empathy or understanding and may be used in all types of unstructured or semistructured (i.e., partially structured) interviews.
The lowest levels, one and two,
have no place in a professional interview and should be avoided. Low-level responses, however, occur frequently in everyday conversations.
Active Listening
This type of responding, sometimes called active listening, is the foundation of good interviewing skills for many different types of interviews.
Mental Status Examination
primarily to diagnose psychosis, brain damage, and other major mental health problems
purpose is to evaluate a person suspected of having neurological or emotional problems in terms of variables known to be related to these problems
areas covered in the mental status examination include the person’s appearance, attitudes, and general behavior
The interviewer is also alert to the interviewee’s emotions
person’s ability to direct and deploy attention the person distracted? Can he or she stick to a task as long as needed to complete it?
Sensory factors also are considered. Is the person seeing things that are not there?
must have a broad understanding of the major mental disorders and the various forms of brain damage. There is no room for amateurs or self-appointed practitioners when a mental status examination is needed.
Developing Interviewing Skills
1 - become familiar with research and theory on the interview in order to understand the principles and underlying variables in the interview.
2 - A second step in learning such skills is supervised practice
3 - one must make a conscious effort to apply the principles involved in good interviewing, such as guidelines for keeping the interaction flowing.
Sources of Error in the Interview
Interview Validity
Many sources of interview error come from the extreme difficulty we have in making accurate, logical observations and judgments
been demonstrated that interviewers form an impression of the interviewee within the first minute or so and spend the rest of the interview trying to confirm that impression
halo effect
labeled this tendency to judge specific traits on the basis of a general impression
Similarly, with an early negative halo, the interviewer will have difficulty seeing the positives. In short, halo effects impair objectivity and must be consciously avoided.
Similarly, people tend to judge on the basis of one outstanding characteristic - general standoffishness
One prominent characteristic can bias the interviewer’s judgments and prevent an objective evaluation. In an early classic paper, Burtt (1926) noted the tendency of interviewers to make unwarranted inferences from personal appearance- physical appearance can play a major role in how a job applicant is perceived and rated
Interview Reliability
unstructured interviews have low levels of reliability
Research also shows that in terms of adverse impact, interviews give fairer outcomes than many other widely used selection tools, including psychometric tests of ability and intelligence
McCarthy et al. (2010) argued that one reason for fluctuations in interview reliability is, in part, because interview procedures vary considerably in their degree of standardization in terms of interview development, administration, and/or scoring. Simply, different interviewers look for different things.
Active Listening
This type of responding, sometimes called active listening, is the foundation of good interviewing skills for many different types of interviews.
agreement among interviewers varies for different types of interviews.
The research suggests that a highly structured interview in which specific questions are asked in a specific order can produce highly stable results
the internal consistency reliability for scores on highly structured interviews was .79 where the interviewer was gathering information about the interviewee’s experience, .90 where interviewees responded to hypothetical dilemmas they may experience on the job, and .86 where the interviewer was gathering information about the interviewees’ past behavior
problem is that such structure can limit the content of the interview, thus defeating the purpose of providing a broad range of data.
