Interviewing Techniques Flashcards

Interviewing Techniques

Types of Interviews

• Structured Interview:
  • A narrow and restricted type of interview.
  • The interviewer asks a set of prepared questions.
  • Directive, as the interviewer guides and controls the interview's course.
• Unstructured Interview:
  • A broad and unrestricted type of interview.
  • The interviewer does not rely on a prepared list of questions.
  • Builds off the information presented by the interviewee.
  • Commonly used in intake or diagnostic interviews.
  • Nondirective, as the interviewee determines the interview's direction.
• Interview Method:
  • Used for gathering data about an individual.
  • The information is used to describe the individual or make future predictions.
  • Evaluated using standard psychometric properties like reliability and validity.
  • The primary method of data collection in clinical psychiatry.

Reciprocal Nature of Interviewing

• All interviews involve mutual interaction.
• Participants (interviewer and interviewee) are interdependent and influence each other; even their moods are affected.
• Social Facilitation:
  • We tend to act like the models around us.
  • If the interviewer shows qualities like stress or aloofness, the interviewee may respond similarly.
  • An interviewer should exhibit openness, warmth, acceptance, comfort, calmness, and support to create those conditions.
• A good interviewer remains in control and sets the tone.

Principles of Effective Interviewing

• The Proper Attitudes:
  • Good interviewing is more about attitude than skill.
  • Interpersonal Influence: The degree to which one person can influence another.
  • Related to Interpersonal Attraction: The degree to which people share understanding, respect, and similarity.
  • Attitudes related to good interviewing skills: Warmth, genuineness, acceptance, understanding, openness, honesty, and fairness.
  • Interviewees' perception of the interviewer's feelings is crucial.

Responses to Avoid

• Judgmental or Evaluative Statements:
  • Likely to inhibit the interviewee.
  • Judging involves evaluating someone's thoughts, feelings, or actions using terms like "good," "bad," "excellent," etc.
  • Judging puts people on guard and inhibits them from revealing information, unless it is a stress interview.
  • Stress interview assesses how an interviewee handles stress by inducing discomfort or anxiety.
• Probing Statements (Asking "Why?")
  • Tends to place people on the defensive.
  • Demands more information than the interviewee wants to provide.
  • Implies a judgmental quality.
  • May induce the interviewee to reveal something they're not ready for, causing anxiety.
  • Replace "why?" with "Tell me" or "How?" statements.
• Hostile Statements:
  • Direct anger towards the interviewee.
• False Reassurance:
  • Reassuring attempts like "don't worry" are unhelpful.
  • The interviewee will realize that you are not going to help them.
  • The interviewee needs to understand the situation in manageable doses before taking action.

Effective Responses

• Keeping the interaction flowing is a major principle.
• The interview is a two-way process.
• The interviewer minimizes effort to maintain flow as long as verbalizations relate to the interview's purpose.
• Maintain face-to-face contact.
• Initiate the interview with an open-ended question.
  • Cannot be answered specifically.
  • Gives the interviewee wide latitude in choosing the topic.
• Close-ended question brings the interview to a halt.
• Open-ended questions require spontaneous production, while close-ended questions require recall.

Responses to Keep the Interaction Flowing

• After asking the open-ended question, the interviewer lets the interviewee respond without interruption.
• Use minimal effort to maintain the flow with transitional phrases like "Yes," "And," or "I see."
• Interview should be thematic to avoid jumping from unrelated topic to topic.
• Types of Statements:
  • Verbatim Playback:
    • Repeats the interviewee's last response.
    • Leads to elaboration.
  • Paraphrasing and Restatement:
    • Paraphrasing is more similar to the interviewee’s response than a restatement.
    • Captures the meaning of the interviewee’s response.
    • Communicate listening and encourage elaboration.
  • Summarizing:
    • Pulls together the meaning of several interviewee responses.
    • Involves verbatim playback, paraphrasing, and restating.
  • Clarification:
    • Serves to clarify the interviewee’s response.
• Each response communicates a degree of understanding.
  • Verbatim playback communicates that the interviewer has heard the communication.
  • Restatement, paraphrase, and summarizing responses communicate that the interviewer has a good idea of what the interviewee is trying to communicate.
  • Clarification shows further comprehension.
  • Empathy or understanding response communicates understanding of how the interviewee feels.
  • Accurate empathy elicits self-exploration.

Measuring Understanding

• Understanding responses that stay close to the content and feeling allow interviewees to explore their situations more fully.
• Interviewers start with an open-ended question followed by understanding statements.

Levels of Responses

• Level One Responses:
  • Bear little to no relationship to the interviewee's response.
  • Example: “Look at my dress” reply: “I hope it doesn’t rain today”
• Level Two Responses:
  • Communicate a superficial awareness of the meaning of a statement.
  • Never goes beyond their own limited perspective.
  • Impede the flow of communication.
  • Example: “The dress looks good on me. I feel happy” “It’s probably going to rain. I feel bad” “I’ll wear this dress to your baseball game” “If it rains, there won’t be a game”
• Level Three Responses:
  • Interchangeable with the interviewee's statement.
  • The minimum level of responding that can help the interviewee.
  • Paraphrasing, verbatim feedback, clarification statements, and restatements are examples.
• Level Four and Level Five Responses:
  • Not only provide accurate empathy but also go beyond the statement given.
  • level-four → interviewer adds “noticeably” to interviewee’s response.
  • level-five → interviewer adds “significantly to interviewee’s response.
• Note: Level one and two have no place in a professional interview and should be avoided; they often occur in everyday conversations.
• Level three represents varying degrees of true empathy and may be used in unstructured or semi-structured interviews.
• Levels four and five are primarily relevant for therapeutic interviews.
• Beginning interviewers should learn to respond at level three before advancing.
• Active listening is the foundation of good interviewing skills.

Mental Status Examination

• Primarily used to diagnose psychosis, brain damage, and other major mental health problems.
• Purpose: To evaluate a person suspected of having neurological or emotional problems.
• Areas Covered:
  • Appearance, attitudes, and general behavior.
  • Interviewee’s emotions.
  • Thought processes.
  • Intelligence
    • Thought speed and accuracy of thinking, richness of thought content, memory, judgment, and ability to interpret proverbs.
  • Quality of thought processes (thought content analysis).
  • Ability to direct and deploy attention.
  • Sensory factors.
• To make proper use of the mental status examination, you must have a broad understanding of the major mental disorders and the various forms of brain damage.

Steps in Developing Interviewing Skills

1. Become familiar with research and theory on the interview.
2. Supervised practice experience.
3. Make a conscious effort to apply the principles, such as guidelines for keeping the interaction flowing and constant self-evaluation.

Sources of Error in the Interview

• Interview Validity:
  • Many errors come from the difficulty in making accurate observations and judgments.
  • Halo Effect:
    • Tendency to judge specific traits based on a general impression.
    • Occurs when the interviewer forms an early impression that biases the rest of the judgment process.
    • Interviewers form an impression within the first minute and try to confirm it.
    • Impairs objectivity and must be consciously avoided.
  • General Standoutishness:
    • Tendency to judge based on one outstanding characteristic, usually physical appearance.
  • Cultural Distortion:
    • Can be found in cross-ethnic, cross-cultural, and cross-class interviewing.
    • Results from ignorance of cultural differences.
    • We can easily send the wrong message or misinterpret others’ intentions if we are not careful.
• Highly structured interview continues to be the most effective means of eliminating, or at least reducing, bias
  • Draws individuating information from the interviewee, and this in turn overrides initial perceptions, providing resistance against bias.
  • Three goals
    • Interviewers must be motivated to form an accurate impression of the interviewee.
    • Interviewer must focus more attention on the interviewee in order to notice, remember, and use individuating information that is not consistent with initial perceptions.
    • Must focus on information that is predictive of job performance.
• Validity tells us about the meaning of test scores
• Errors that reduce objectivity produce inaccurate judgments, biasing the evaluation.
• Consider interview data as tentative: a hypothesis to be confirmed by other sources.
• Interview data may have dubious value without standardized procedures.
• Interview data and standardized test results go hand in hand.

Interview Reliability

• Refers to the stability, dependability, or consistency of test results.
• Questions center on inter-interviewer agreement (agreement between two or more interviewers).
• Unstructured interviews have low reliability.
• Interviews give fairer outcomes than many other selection tools, including psychometric tests.
• Variations in reliability occur because interviewers look for different things.
• Highly structured interviews can produce stable results, but the structure can limit the content.
• Reliability is limited by the interviewee's memory and honesty and the interviewer's clerical capabilities. It would only be limited by the memory and honesty of the interviewee and the clerical capabilities of the interviewer.