Interview (General)

Introduction

The interview can be defined as the assessment or research instrument that precedes any type of intervention to decision-making process, adopting an interactive format, given the very nature of the instrument and because it is part of the assessment-intervention continuum (see entry on ‘Interview in Behavioural and Health Settings’).

It was recognized in the 1970s as the most widespread assessment instrument in applied psychology, regardless of the assessor's theoretical frame of reference (Kanfer & Grimm, 1977; Haynes, 1978). This can be confirmed by examining any applied field.

In the 1980s there was particular concern over the need to adapt the instrument to the area of social services (Chandler, 1989), and since the 1990s there has been a tendency to employ interviews directed towards specific populations and objectives: selection of subjects for positions with well-defined requirements; alleged child victims of physical or sexual abuse; the elderly; abused women; depressed patients; and experts, whose knowledge can be represented using physical devices. In the case of experts, the aim may be didactic or to provide a support tool for decision-making.

In addition, the interview usually constitutes the first contact with patients, clients, applicants or research participants. It is the fundamental unit of connection between the psychologist or counsellor and the person or persons looking for help, advice or a job, or in need of psychological assessment. It requires, at least, the presence of two persons who interact; one of these would be the expert in charge of leading the interactive process.

As an interactive process, the interview has aroused considerable attention in relation to the study of its three components: interviewer, interviewee and information.

Different lines of research have coincided in dealing with aspects and variables of the complex sequences of interactive behaviour: the simultaneous processing of verbal and non-verbal signals (see: De Paulo, 1980; Rosenthal, 1981; Zuckerman and Driver, 1985); the significance and perception of roles of the participants in interactive situations (see: Zebrowitz, 1990); the effect of appearance, physical characteristics, sex, etc., widely studied during the second half of the twentieth century; the basic skills an interviewer should possess in order to manage all the formal aspects (see: Matarazzo & Wiens, 1972) and verbal aspects, considered by the long tradition that began with the pioneering studies on verbal conditioning (Greenspoon, 1955; Taffel, 1955; Verplank, 1955); and finally, the management of information in interactive situations (Hart, 1989; Márquez & Muñoz, 1994).

There was a progressive growth in expectations that the interview, as an essential assessment technique, could provide professionals with valid, reliable and accurate information.

In general terms, the guarantees of information obtained via the interview are closely linked to the type of interview (according to the degree of structuredness), its objectives and the context of its application. Thus, in personnel selection, as well as in mental health or learning disabilities classifications, the professional aims to maximize certain achievements considered as reference criteria: job success, number of abilities for successful learning, presence of symptoms. He or she obtains a record of the outcome and compares it with the prediction suggested by the interview: predictive validity is being assessed. In other situations, data-collection methods may already be in use, so that the user tries to determine whether the new data provided by the interview agrees with the information already obtained, in order to assess concurrent validity. The relationship between content and construct validity is examined in order to assess whether the information gathered using the interview gives a fair measure of performance in some important sets of tasks or behaviours, and to evaluate whether such information reflects basic principles, concepts and assumptions held by the theoretical model employed. Reliability studies give information about the consistency throughout a series of assessments using interviews. An inaccurate interview cannot be a good predictor. The interviewer usually wishes to know the person's position with regard to certain general or specific variables (criteria); the information gathered from responses or narratives elicited by interview questions or topics is considered representative of the client's position or placement in relation to these criteria.

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