Interview in Child and Family Settings

Introduction

Interview can be defined as a system of communication, typically dyadic, aimed at acquiring information. The interview is a basic tool in many social sciences, including psychology. In every field of child psychology, from basic research to professional practice, sooner or later one will be faced with the task of discovering what a child thinks, feels or knows. Nevertheless, the validity of the interview (and more generally the use of verbal protocols; see Praetorious & Duncan, 1988) is continually debated, especially with children (Bruck & Ceci, 1996).

Interviewing is dangerously similar to everyday conversations. In fact, asking and answering are basic human activities (Flammer, 1981), which take place in the most varied occasions: a dialogue between friends, a school exam, a medical interrogation, a police questioning, and so on. In each of these situations, the communicative exchange is set by implicit, yet powerful rules (Schenkein, 1978). Some of these regulative factors apply to every dialogue, such as the need of turn taking, or the looks which signal the onset and the end of the verbal exchange; other rules, such as the degree of interpersonal distance, vary from one culture to another; still others, such as the degree of politeness required or the reciprocity of roles, depend on the characteristics of the partners and the content of the dialogue. We apply all these non-written rules based on tacit assumptions about speakers' roles and aims, and children more than anyone else do it unknowingly. It is hence clear that the first step towards interviewing well is to know the nature of this particular kind of verbal exchange, and to make it clear to the interviewees.

Investigative and Clinical Interviews

Psychological interviews can be grouped in two broad classes, each roughly associated with some [Page 491]general characteristics. In the first class – investigative interviews – we can include all the interviews aimed exclusively at discovering some respondent's mental contents, for research or forensic purposes. The second class comprises all kinds of clinical interviews, in which the need of obtaining useful information for the diagnosis is intertwined with that of establishing a therapeutic alliance. Investigative interviews are associated with: the interviewer as a main beneficiary of the obtained information; a strategy of non-interference with the interviewee's ideas and feelings; a preference for standardized formats. Clinical interviews are associated with: the interviewee as a main beneficiary of the given information; a legitimate intervention in the interviewee's ideas and feelings; a preference for highly flexible formats.

In practice, psychological interviews often escape such a clear-cut classification. For instance, with young children the maximum of possible standardization can be a list of contents to be orderly followed since it is necessary to adapt the actual phrasing to the child's language, attention span and tolerance for the interview situation as a whole.

Investigative interview techniques were first developed in the context of research about cognitive development. Piaget (1926) explained how it is possible to use interview as reliable sources for studying children's ideas, but he also outlined how easy it is to come up with useless answers. Children can answer randomly, if poorly motivated, tired, bored; or they can produce myths and fantasies, if they treat the interview as play; or they can parrot the interviewer's suggestions. Piaget's generalized guidelines on how to conduct valid interviews were incorporated in the research paradigm stemming from his work. Only recently, however, systematic studies have become common, especially under the pressure of the increasing number of child witnesses in legal cases of abuse or controversial parental custody (Pool & Lamb, 1998). In fact, legal court and psychological research are among the few situations in which children can be irreplaceable sources of information.

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