Interviewing Techniques

• Interviewing involves techniques for effective communication and information gathering

Directive Interview

• The interviewer directs, guides, and controls the course of the interview
• Examples of questions include outlining educational experiences or work history

Nondirective Interview

• The interviewee determines the direction of the interview

Reciprocal Nature of Interviewing

• Mutual interaction where participants are interdependent and influence each other
• Social facilitation involves acting like models

Principles of Effective Interviewing

• A proper attitude is more important than skill
• Interpersonal influence is related to interpersonal attraction, including understanding, respect, and similarity
• Attitudes include warmth, genuineness, acceptance, understanding, openness, honesty, and fairness

Responses to Avoid

• Stressing the interviewee to make them uncomfortable should be avoided
• Judgmental or evaluative statements can inhibit the interviewee
• Avoid using terms like "good", "bad", "excellent", "terrible", "disgusting", "disgraceful", and "stupid"
• Asking "Why?" can make people defensive
• Hostile statements direct anger toward the interviewee
• Reassuring statements attempt to comfort, but false reassurance should be avoided

Effective Responses

• The interviewer should listen with interest and maintain face-to-face contact
• Start with open-ended questions to initiate the interview
• Open-ended questions give latitude in choosing topics
• Interviewers follow general guidelines to understand and predict behavior

Responses to Keep Interaction Flowing

• Transitional phrases include "Yes", "I see", and "Go on"
• Verbatim playback repeats the interviewee's exact words
• Paraphrasing and restatement repeats the interviewee's response using different words
• Summarizing pulls together the meaning of several responses
• Clarification response clarifies the interviewee's response
• Empathy and understanding communicates understanding

Measuring Understanding

• Originated from Carl Rogers's Client-centered therapy
• Highest degrees of empathy, levels four and five, are for therapeutic interviews
• Level three may be used in all types of unstructured or semi-structured interviews
• Lowest levels (one and two) have no place in a professional interview

Level-One Responses

• Bear little or no relationship to the interviewee's response

Level-Two Responses

• Communicates a superficial awareness of the meaning of a statement
• The individual never quite goes beyond their own limited perspective

Level-Three Responses

• Interchangeable with the interviewee's statement
• According to Carkhuff and Berenson (1967), level three is the minimum level of responding that can help the interviewee
• Paraphrasing, verbatim playback, clarification statements, and restatements are examples

Level-Four and Level-Five Responses

• Provide accurate empathy and go beyond the statement given
• In a level-four response, the interviewer adds "noticeably"
• In a level-five response, the interviewer adds "significantly"
• Active listening is the foundation of good interviewing skills

Types of Interview

• Involves confrontation statements that point out discrepancies or inconsistencies
• Induces anxiety by bringing conflicts or inconsistencies into a person's awareness when they aren't ready to handle them

Structured Clinical Interviews

• Have a specific set of questions presented in a particular order
• Offers reliability but sacrifices flexibility

Case History Interviews

• Includes questions about chronology of major events, work history, medical history, and family history

Mental Status Examination

• Important tool in psychiatric and neurological examinations

Developing Interviewing Skills

• Become familiar with research and theory
• Supervised practice
• Consciously apply the principles involved

Sources of Error in the Interview

• Interview validity comes from difficulty in making accurate observations and judgments
• Halo effect is the tendency to judge specific traits based on general impressions
• General standoutishness is judging based on one outstanding characteristic
• Errors can occur in cross-ethnic, cross-cultural, and cross-class interviewing
• Interviewers must be trained to evaluate highly specific dimensions for interview reliability