Keywords

Synonyms

Clinical assessment; Clinical intake; Consultations; Conversations; Dialogues; Qualitative Data collection

Definition

In the discipline of psychology, an interview is primarily a type of inquiry and/or assessment in which data is gathered (or generated) from the interviewee’s first-person perspective as situated within an interpersonal, social context.

Introduction

The overall purpose of the interview is to gain psychological knowledge about either the client and/or research participant and/or the phenomenon under investigation. The interview is traditionally situated within a face-to-face context where a clinical and/or research psychologist asks or engages the client/participant about psychological relevant content. Although the interview is often accompanied by standardized psychological tests and assessments, it is still seen as the principle context from which to ground professional judgment. Interviews in clinical and research settings are often categorized as unstructured, structured, or semistructured. All types of interviews have methodological issues that can be directly traced to epistemological problems concerning the relation between the cultural, interpersonal, and psychological dimensions, the latter, of course, serving as the primary emphasis in contemporary psychology. Interviews are also loaded with ethical issues in which private matters are made public, forcing the psychologist to deal with the tension between vulnerability, trust, dignity, and the law. The following entry will cover the main formats of both clinical and research interviews, although with a focus on epistemological issues.

Types of Interviews

Clinical interviews are often contrasted with research interviews, even though these could at times be combined, as in clinical research. In the clinical psychological or psychiatric interview, the purpose is to gain knowledge about the person in order to assess psychological issues relating to, for example, development, diagnosis, personality, and social context. Clinical interviews could also signify the beginning phase of a treatment process, thus constituting the first phase in developing a therapeutic relationship and alliance within a professional, interpersonal context. There can often be thematic cross-over between the subject matter of research interviews and those of clinical interviews. In-depth qualitative research interviews could also initiate a situation in which the participants start reflecting on issues and thus disclose sensitive, psychological insights. Hence, both the clinical as well as the research interview demand high standards in terms of ethical considerations. Whether clinical or research oriented, the psychological interview is a rigorous scientific activity and a method for data collection.

Psychological interviews can be categorized into three distinct formats, such as (1) the structured interview, (2) the unstructured interview, or (3) the semistructured interview. Conventionally, the structured format is associated with research purposes, the unstructured with clinical work, whereas the semistructured is seen as a compromise between the two. However, such a categorization becomes an oversimplification, especially in light of recent developments in qualitative research methodologies. In addition, the methodological evaluation of these three formats is similar to how psychological tests are being critically assessed, that is, how the specific format relates to issues of validity and reliability. Nonetheless, approaching the psychological interview in terms of one of these three formats could also be seen as correlative of the psychologist’s theoretical perspective, which will be further disclosed in what here follows.

The structured interview is similar to psychological testing in that it considers questions from a behavioristic, experimental perspective, that is, the questions are seen as stimuli or prompts that evoke a certain response from the psychological subject. Most notably is the standardized psychiatric interview (e.g., First et al. 1997; Zimmerman 2013), developed to match the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (2013). The method is seen as useful in upholding an objective distance from the client or research participant, and minimizing interpersonal-based distractions from asking the essential, clinical questions. The structured interview is also seen as useful in the sense of research purposes, especially in terms of technically being able to assure interrater reliability and thus laying the ground for rigorous operationalization and measurement. Here, priority is thus given to standardization. The idea behind a structured interview can therefore be linked to the experimental research tradition in psychology, valuing an investigation in which one controls for intervening, confounding variables, such as, for example, personal factors of the interviewer or interpersonal factors such as social interaction.

The unstructured interview format is often seen as the polar opposite to the structured interview, especially in regard to the epistemic value of interrater reliability and standardization. Nevertheless, the term “unstructured” is highly misrepresentative, because most interviewers work from some sort of theoretical orientation or from past, professional experience. Often praised by clinicians as meeting essential criteria such as ecological validity and also a format more congruent with an ethical stance (i.e., priority to the person, in contrast to priority of standardization). The unstructured interview could thus be seen as having an advantage in the exploratory milieu of the clinical interview, in which interpersonal factors such as empathy and alliance take center stage. When it comes to both the clinical and the research interview, Rogers (1945) has made a lasting contribution to the argument in favor of the unstructured interview and provided empirical evidence (in terms of recordings of interview situations) that granting epistemic authority to the client and/or research participant as opposed to the pre-established questions is beneficial for epistemic, clinical, and ethical reasons. Although this is not to say that Rogers’s approach is free from pre-established theoretical criteria and ethical problems, instead his work has challenged the negative assumption of the unstructured interview as being unscientific.

The third and last format covered here is the semistructured interview, perhaps seen as seeking the best parts of the previous two formats, however, also opening up for new methodological and ethical challenges. In the most general sense, the semistructured interview can provide for some openness in following the client or research participant, opening up for empathy and alliance, as well as following certain pre-establish questions. The semistructured interviewer can make sure that the essential clinical and/or research questions are asked and at the same time allowing for an interpersonal encounter to develop. Within this third format, the interviewer is working from a constant shift in attitude between pre-establish questions and the interaction (as in a figure-ground relation). In this format, the psychologist has to be situated within the contextual flow of the interaction and the communication process, sometimes realizing that some pre-established questions have already been answered (e.g., when having allowed the client and/or research participant to freely explore or elaborate in an open question format). One way to look at the semistructured interview is that it can spontaneously combine unstructured and structured approaches within one situation. In terms of mainstream, natural scientific psychology, this means that one could combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection procedures. In contrast, there are also examples of semistructured interviews with a strict qualitative emphasis (Kvale and Brinkmann 2009). Such qualitative, semistructured interviews can be rooted in either an empirical (empiricist) or a phenomenological theory of science (Giorgi 2009), in which the former seems to be the most customary approach. On the other hand, examples of semistructured phenomenological interviews are also prevalent in psychiatry, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, such as the clinical (and research) diagnostic oriented EASE-interview (Jansson and Nordgaard 2016; Parnas et al. 2005; Parnas and Henriksen 2014), the individual psychological assessment (Fischer 1994), and the more research oriented, such as empathic interviewing (e.g., Churchill 2010; Englander 2012) and explicitation interviewing (e.g., Maurel 2009; Petitmengin 2006; Vermersch 1999).

All three formats naturally have their pros and cons. Considering the nature of the psychological object of investigation and its relation to the interview as a data collection procedure and/or initial situation for therapy, the format could thus be seen to vary based on the interviewer’s psychological perspective. For example, the natural scientific orientation of the cognitive-behavioral psychologist matches the structured interview, whereas the theory-oriented psychodynamic practitioner and liberatory emphasis of the humanistic psychologist may find better fits with the unstructured and semistructured approach to interviews. Nevertheless, framing the combination between interview format and psychologist’s perspective should be seen mainly as theoretically motivated, provided that most psychologists (especially clinicians) are unlikely to be theoretical purists. In addition, given the fact that psychologists are situated in a society means that they also must adapt and relate to a set of predetermined organizational and cultural structures. For example, psychologists are socially interdependent on other agents in society, such as insurance companies or grant application boards, both that favor standardization criteria. In addition, lately, the mainstream research community of the American Psychological Association (APA) (2010) has defined psychology as a STEM discipline (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), which seems to limit psychology to rest on an empirical theory of science (Giorgi 2014), consequently reinforcing a focus on operationalization, measurement, and standardization. On the other hand, the result of the second Task Force on Evidenced-Based Therapy Relationship (Norcross and Wampold 2011), in evaluating good psychotherapeutic outcome, identified interpersonal and relationship factors (e.g., empathy, alliance, collaboration) as necessary ingredients to any treatment method. Such results raise several critical questions concerning the use of standardization in any type of clinical inquiry, making the semistructured interview into a viable alternative. However, the demand for specialized, interpersonal training and the effort to break new ground in our contemporary age of standardization makes the alternative of the semistructured interview a more difficult road to follow.

Although the unstructured and semistructured interviews are often seen as highly demanding in terms of specialized interpersonal or personal training, all formats of clinical and research interviews obviously require some sort of training and supervision, especially in relation to methodological and ethical issues. To conduct psychodynamic interviews demands years of specialized training, including having to go through several years of psychoanalysis oneself. The person-centered approach in humanistic psychology also includes extensive, specialized training in one’s ability to listen to the client and/or research participant, and the retrospective ability as a therapist and/or researcher to critically assess one’s own interactions within interview situations, using video or audio recordings. Becoming a phenomenological psychological interviewer also requires demanding interpersonal as well as methodological training, in which, for example, one must be able to constantly shift from the focus researcher/clinician to person (i.e., interpersonal and ethical) to researcher/clinician to research object/diagnosis (i.e., epistemic) (e.g., Englander 2012). However, due to its standardized approach, the structured interview can be seen as interpersonally less demanding and more procedurally oriented. Nonetheless, depending on the level of care adopted on behalf of the interviewer and/or help needed by the interviewee, given the specific nature of the topic or emotional content, even the structured interview demands extensive academic, professional, and ethical training (including proper clinical supervision).

Methodological Issues

The history of the psychological interview can be traced all the way back to the actual subject matter of psychology as a modern science – even its very scope and method as a discipline. Psychology took the psyche as its scientific object of study, although the psyche has historically come to refer to everything from consciousness, to the unconscious, to behavior, to cognition, and so forth, depending on the paradigmatic shifts of the psychologist’s theoretical orientation. The epistemic relation of particular interest to empirical psychology has been that of causality, whereas phenomenological psychology has focused on intentionality. The persistent problem throughout the history of psychological interviews has thus been an unsettling argument either for or against the inclusion of the subject as an intentional agent. Nevertheless, data collection into the first-person perspective, using the interview format, no matter one’s theoretical orientation, seems to prevail (even though a historical era of extreme Watsonian behaviorism could be seen as an exception). As Kvale and Brinkmann (2009) have shown, the trajectory of the psychological interview can be found in, for instance, the Freudian clinical interview, the qualitative research interviews in Mayo’s Hawthorne study, or Piaget’s interviews with children. In addition, one could also trace psychological interviews to qualitative subjective reports and its historical origin to the method of introspection. Although the different versions of introspection varied from self-observation to internal perception (and Brentano’s famous distinction between the two), it was the latter that was used by Wundt (Danziger 1990, 2001). In a general sense, introspection as situated within an empirical perspective is an internal perception of an image and can be seen as analogous to external sense perception of the empirical world (Danziger 2001). Nonetheless, it was the Wurzburg school, with its controversial findings of the imageless thought, that challenged a psychology based on an empirical theory of science (Giorgi 2014). Thus, the problems related to the method of introspection raise similar fundamental epistemological questions in regard to psychological interviews, as both data collection methods (despite numerous methodological variations) seek some sort of qualitative data from the first-person perspective. Just like the method of introspection did in the beginning days of modern psychology, the method of interviewing challenge the whole discipline of psychology as having its epistemological ground in an empirical theory of science.

Epistemological disputes regarding interviews often emerge as methodological issues originating in the fundamental problem of what theory of science should guide the science of psychology. For example, some qualitative psychological researchers have introduced validity checks, commonly referred to as triangulation. In such a procedure, the participants are not just being interviewed, but after the analysis (or sometimes during the analysis), assume the expert role of the scientist in which they perform validity checks of the analysis. Such validity checks could be seriously questioned on the obvious ground that nonpsychologists are carrying out levels of scientific validity checks. However, every so often when human subjectivity is at stake, as in psychological research or in a clinical setting, and when different levels of authority are involved (e.g., interviewer/clinician versus participant/client), human subjectivity is seen as anybody’s business, sometimes even relativized. In addition, and from an ethical stance, the psychologists will often have to assume that the client and/or the research participant has the last word, hence ethically protecting the client and/or the research participant. In other words, where does the psychologist draw the line between ethics and epistemology, especially as such boundaries are played out in the interpersonal context of the interview situation? As Kvale (2006) has emphasized, even in empathic and caring types of interviews, different levels of authority between the interviewer and the interviewee are always present. Unfortunately, the ethical stance often becomes ad hoc matters following the epistemic stance, or the other way around, instead of being properly interpersonally and socially contextualized (Englander 2015). At times, some postmodern approaches can view the actual words used by the interviewee as the psychological finding itself, thus granting the participants final authority in the context of psychological science, and hence skipping the psychological analysis altogether.

Moreover, the methodological problems relating to the first-person perspective and access to such a perspective are still heavily debated in psychology. Nevertheless, taking an interest in the first-person perspective is not exclusive to psychology, but also prevalent in neighboring medical sciences such as neurology and neuroscience. For instance, and to follow a critical stance once voiced by Erwin Straus (1966), the whole growing field of cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology would not be much more than images on a computer screen without a consultation of the first-person perspective – to provide meaning and sensibility. In other words, the nature of the psychological phenomenon within the interpersonal research context of the interview is different from the nature of the empirical object as approached by the experimental method (Giorgi 2014), and as scientists we have to find ways to respect their “mutual constraints” (Varela 1996, p. 330), but perhaps also work interdisciplinary toward a “mutual enlightenment” (Gallagher 1997, p. 195). Hence, the first-person perspective, no matter how it is interpreted and approached within the interview situation, self-reports, or even different methods of introspection, still remains one of the core methodological problems in terms of the data base of a psychological science. The interview is not immune to the fundamental methodological issues of psychology, but situates itself within the same epistemological problem of how to gain access to the first-person perspective of the client and/or research participant.

Perhaps the most discussed methodological problem related to the use of interviews, especially in terms of qualitative psychological research, is that of representativeness. Interview-based research are often misjudged as having the same epistemological context as population research, in which samples are evaluated on the basis of their representativeness to a particular population. One could argue that such a misconception does not directly apply to structured interviews, as this format could be evaluated in a similar way as population research is evaluated; mostly due to the similar reduction such as operationalization, measurement, and standardization. However, unstructured and semistructured interview research often searching for qualitative results with a focus on psychological meaning (that rest on intentionality) as opposed to causality (or statistical correlations) cannot be evaluated following the logic of population research. Because psychological meanings are context dependent, the ground for such interview research is thus the psychological context (e.g., social, developmental) in which the psychological phenomenon (e.g., experiencing a lack of understanding from one’s peers, the experience of learning algebra) appear, and not something that is inside a population. In other words, sampling strategies in population research, in order to satisfy criteria of inferential statistics within the discipline of social statistics, is not to be confused with selection criteria in qualitative interview research. Empirical psychology (including qualitative empirical psychology), adopting population research strategies, has historically had problems in dealing with this fundamental epistemological difference.

Recently, phenomenological philosophers (e.g., Zahavi 2014), psychiatrists (e.g., Parnas et al. 2005), and psychologists (e.g., Englander 2012) have proposed a second-person access to the first-person perspective situated within a broader human context (i.e., the lifeworld). Such a proposal is congruent with Giorgi’s (2009, 2014) suggestion of a phenomenological theory of science as a base for human scientific psychology, based on interview material. Second-person access, with its initial focus on interpersonal understanding and social context, could also contribute in solving the interrelated boundary problems between epistemology and ethics – problems that are played out in the struggle between modern and postmodern approaches to psychological research.

Conclusion

Interviews’ underlying value is to collect material about the other person’s first-person perspective within an interpersonal context in order to either research a psychological phenomenon or be engaged in clinically work with a client. The three different types of interviews (structured, unstructured, and semistructured) can be traced to (on a theoretical level) different psychological perspectives, including the historical era in which these paradigms were originally formed. The format of the structured interview also correlates with other agencies operating in a contemporary Western society, in which standardization is prioritized. The unstructured and semistructured interview formats provide for sensible alternatives in which also psychological meaning can be qualitatively assessed or researched. Even though there is an internal conflict within psychology as to how interviews should be conducted and what theory of science it should rest on, the psychologist’s interest in the other person’s first-person perspective remains important for epistemic as well as ethical reasons. In other words, psychological interviews have a very important role for the science of psychology, especially as long as the psyche remains its subject matter. The conflict of how knowledge should be viewed and how it should be balanced with ethics (within the context of the interview) will most likely persist as the ongoing struggle in what constitutes as the proper theory of science for psychology. Did knowledge precede the interview, or did it generate during the interview, or can it be seen as something constructed after the interview, or is the interview merely a microcosm of what is happening in society at large? In addition, there is also a different point of departure, a phenomenological alternative, suggesting that no matter where or when anything is caused or constructed or generated, psychological meanings will appear in a psychological context, and such meanings can always be described and will be of value for a psychological science.

Cross-References