material that the patient may already have covered
with other clinic staff.
In addition, the clinician should be perfectly
clear about the purpose of the interview. Is it to eval-
uate the patient for hospitalization? Is the patient
seeking information? If the interview is being con-
ducted on a referral basis, the clinician should be
quite sure that he or she understands what informa-
tion is being requested by the referring person. It is
always disconcerting to discover later that, as a clini-
cian, you misinterpreted the reason for the interview.
Through it all, the clinician must remain
focused. However, objectivity need not imply cold-
ness or aloofness. Rather, it suggests that the clinician
must be secure enough to maintain composure and
not lose sight of the purposes of the interview. For
example, if a client should become very angry and
attack the clinician’s ability, training, or good inten-
tions, the clinician must remember that the first obli-
gation is to understand. The clinician should be
secure enough to distinguish between reality and
the forces that drive the patient.
Depending on the purpose of the interview, the
clinician should also be prepared to provide some
closure for the client at the conclusion of the inter-
view. That is, as the interview progresses, the
clinician will be formulating hypotheses and recom-
mendations. A confident but enigmatic smile at the
close of the interview, coupled with a“We’ll be in
touch,”will not suffice. The clinician should be pre-
pared to make a referral, set up another appointment,
and/or provide some feedback to the client.
Varieties of Interviews
Up to this point, we have reviewed various inter-
viewing essentials and techniques that are relevant to
the interviewing process, regardless of the type of
interview. In this section, we discuss several of the
more common types of interviews that clinical psy-
chologists conduct. It is important to note, however,
that more than one of these interviews may be
administered to the same client or patient. For exam-
ple, the same patient may complete an intake-
admission interview when admitted to a hospital, a
case-history and mental status examination interview
once on the hospital unit, and later astructured diag-
nostic interviewby the treating clinician. With this in
mind, let us now turn to a survey of some of the
more commonly used types of interviews.
The many varieties of interviews have two pri-
mary distinguishing features. First, interviews differ
in their purpose. For example, the purpose of one
interview may be to evaluate a client who is pre-
senting to an outpatient clinic for the first time
(intake-admission interview), whereas the purpose of
another interview may be to arrive at aDSM-
IV-TRdiagnostic formulation (diagnostic interview).
The second major distinguishing factor is whether
an interview is unstructured (often labeled a“clinical
interview”) or structured. In unstructured interviews,
clinicians are allowed to ask any questions that come
to mind in any order. In contrast, structured interviews
require the clinician to ask, verbatim, a set of standard-
ized questions in a specified sequence. We will have
much more to say about structured versus unstructured
interviews later in this chapter.
Thesamekindsofskillsarerequiredregardlessof
the purpose or type of interview. Rapport, good
communication skills, appropriate follow-up ques-
tions, and good observational skills are all necessary,
even when administering a structured interview. Also,
it should be kept in mind that any assessment inter-
view may have strong therapeutic overtones. After all,
patients’perceptions of the clinic, their motivation,
and their expectations for help may all be shaped to
a significant extent by their experiences in intake
interviews or in diagnostic screening sessions.
We organize our presentation in this section
according to the purpose of an interview. How-
ever, it is important to keep in mind that structured
and unstructured versions of all these interviews
exist.The Intake-Admission Interview
An intake interview generally has two purposes:
(a) to determine why the patient has come to the
clinic or hospital and (b) to judge whether the
agency’s facilities, policies, and services will meet
the needs and expectations of the patient. ManyTHE ASSESSMENT INTERVIEW 173