290 Assessment Psychology
to the interviewing process fostered not only advances in prac-
tice but also new developments in research. Unlike tests, which
entail a test form or written protocol that remains available for
future review, interviews do not produce any written record
other than whatever process notes may be made during or fol-
lowing them. Recognizing that such notes are largely inade-
quate for research purposes, Rogers, while serving as Director
of the Counseling Center at the University of Chicago, began
making tape recordings of clinical interviews as a means of
obtaining reliable data concerning their exact content. In the re-
search program developed by Rogers and his colleagues, tape
recordings were examined for various patterns of verbal inter-
action between interviewer and interviewee during treatment
sessions. This research on interactive processes in clinical in-
terviews stimulated extensive studies of what became known
as the “anatomy of the interview” (Matarazzo & Wiens, 1972;
Pope, 1979), and Rogers’ innovative work was seminal as well
in fostering systematic psychotherapy research.
Because open-ended interviews require some supplemen-
tation to serve assessment purposes adequately, various for-
mal procedures and guidelines have been inserted over
time into otherwise unstructured interviews. The most notable
of these is the Mental Status Examination (MSE), first pro-
posed in 1902 by Adolf Meyer (1866–1950), a distinguished
psychiatrist best known for championing a humane and
“common-sense” approach to seriously disturbed persons that
included thorough inquiry into their personal history and cur-
rent circumstances. The MSE took form as a series of specific
questions and tasks intended to provide a brief but standard-
ized assessment of a person’s attention, memory, reasoning
ability, social judgment, fund of knowledge, and orientation in
time and space. As elaborated by Trzepacz and Baker (1993),
a contemporary MSE also includes observations concerning a
person’s general appearance, interpersonal conduct, prevail-
ing mood, sense of reality, thought processes, self-awareness,
and intellectual level.
The MSE has become a standard mental health assessment
tool that is considered an integral part of diagnostic evalua-
tions by most psychiatrists and is often used by psychologists
as well, especially when they are not including any other for-
mal tests among their procedures. Paralleling the previously
mentioned interest in short forms of intelligence tests, the
MSE has been particularly popular in an 11-item version de-
veloped in the 1970s as the Mini Mental Status Examination
(Folstein, Folstein, & McHugh, 1975). Whatever the length
of an MSE, however, the information it provides emerges in
fuller and more reliable form in a psychodiagnostic test
battery, and psychological assessors who are including for-
mal testing among their evaluation procedures rarely find use
for it.
Along with the development of the MSE as a semi-
formal addendum, relatively unstructured assessment inter-
views have been shaped by numerous interviewing outlines
or schedules that identify topics to be covered (e.g., nature
and history of presenting complaint, educational and occupa-
tional history) and specific items of information that should
regularly be obtained (e.g., basic demography, current med-
ications, and history of substance use, suicidal behavior, and
physical or sexual abuse). Such interview guides have long
been standard topics in interviewing textbooks for mental
health professionals (e.g., Craig, 1989; Morrison, 1993;
Othmer & Othmer, 1994). From a historical perspective, one
of the most comprehensive and psychologically sensitive but
frequently forgotten contributions of this kind was made by
George Kelley (1905–1966), who is known primarily for de-
veloping personal construct theory and a personality assess-
ment instrument he based on it, the Role Construct Repertory
Test. In a classic book, The Psychology of Personal Con-
structs,Kelley (1955) included several chapters on conduct-
ing assessment interviews that provide excellent guidance by
today’s standards as well as those of a half century ago.Relatively Structured FormatsHowever rich the information obtainable from unstructured
interviews, and despite the flexibility of an unstructured ap-
proach in adapting to unpredictable variations in how inter-
viewees may present themselves, these formats lack sufficiently
standardized procedures to ensure replicable and reliable data
collection. Mounting concerns that the unreliability of diag-
nostic interviews in clinical settings were impeding mental
health research led in the 1970s to the development of the
Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC), which comprised a set of
clearly specified descriptive behavioral criteria for assigning
participants in research studies to one of several diagnostic
categories (Spitzer, Endicott, & Robins, 1978). This descrip-
tive behavioral approach noticeably improved the interrater
reliability achieved by diagnostic interviewers, and the RDC
format, including many of its specific criteria, was subse-
quently incorporated into the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM)of the American Psychiatric Associations, be-
ginning withDSM-IIin 1980 and extending to the present
DSM-IV-TR(American Psychiatric Association, 2000).
The RDC criteria also lent themselves well to formulating
questions to be asked in diagnostic interviews, and they soon
gave rise to a new genre of assessment methods, a relatively
structured interview that consists entirely or in large part of
specific items of inquiry. Simultaneously with the publication
of the RDC criteria, Endicott and Spitzer (1978) introduced
the best known and most frequently used instrument of this