Chapter 19: Interviewing Techniques in Psychology

While the face-to-face nature of interviews fulfills a human need for personal involvement, the text emphasizes the necessity of grounding this technique in scientific rigor to ensure its effectiveness in clinical practice. A crucial distinction is made between therapeutic interviews, designed to produce psychological change, and assessment interviews, which focus on gathering information to form judgments or diagnoses. The analysis reveals that traditional, unstructured clinical interviews often suffer from significant reliability and validity issues, with researchers documenting low levels of agreement among clinicians regarding specific psychiatric diagnoses. These inconsistencies are frequently caused by sources of error such as biassed question formulation, including the risks of leading questions and the specific limitations of open versus closed questions. Furthermore, interviewer characteristics—ranging from demographic factors like social class to personal attitudes and the use of social reinforcers to establish rapport—can unintentionally distort the data collected. The chapter highlights the fallibility of human memory and the impact of social desirability on a respondent's ability to accurately recall information, particularly regarding sensitive or older events. To combat these weaknesses, the text advocates for the implementation of structured interview schedules, which standardize the process, focus on recent events, and separate the data-gathering phase from the eventual clinical judgment. Evidence from personnel selection and military screening further suggests that clinical judgment is often less predictive than objective statistical methods or biographical data. Consequently, the chapter concludes that for interviewing to be a viable scientific tool, practitioners must specify clear objectives, recognize the influence of interviewer-respondent variables, and integrate interview findings with other assessment methods, such as neurological tests and direct behavioral observations, to form a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the individual.