Interviewing

Traditional Interviews

The traditional interview arises from the medical or impairment model that requires discrete role definitions. The impairment or disorder is considered to reside within the client as a result of faulty biologic, neurologic, or psychological processes. This model places the clinician in the role of the expert who holds the knowledge necessary to diagnose and treat the client while the client’s role is more passive. The purpose of the interview in this model is to verify the professional’s perspective, typically utilizing a set of predetermined questions with a predetermined range of responses. Because the information being sought in this model is already determined by the clinician, the same information is often collected across clients and the interest of the professional is to obtain efficient responses that answer the specific questions. This format of interviewing requires the clinician to maintain a professional attitude and may come across as an interrogation of the client. A power differential between the clinician and the client is inherent in this model as the client only provides the information being sought by the professional.

Ethnographic Interviews

Ethnographic interviews arise from the discipline of anthropology as a data collection tool designed to obtain information from the perspective of the informant, or client. In Speech–Language pathology, this model of interviewing became more salient in the 1970s–1980s as the importance of pragmatics and context to human interaction was widely recognized. With this broader perspective, impairment or disorder became contextually or environmentally determined as the client interacts across a range of social structures (home, school, community, vocational). Ethnographic interviews, therefore, seek to discover the client’s experience and perspective living with the communication disorder and to give meaning to behaviors by placing those behaviors in context. This places the client in a more equal role with the professional as the client holds the necessary knowledge regarding the difficulties across interactional settings. The clinician acts more as a student in this model, seeking to understand the impact of the disorder for the particular client. The clinician will necessarily need to collect different information from each client, and the questions to be asked are often discovered in the process of the interview. This interview strategy relies on reciprocal roles for the clinician and client, and the clinician seeks to obtain expanded responses by keeping the client talking. This decreased power differential and orientation to interested conversation allows the clinician to discover what is relevant for each client’s experience. Because of the client-as-informant nature of the ethnographic interview, the potential for bias in assessment and intervention is reduced and the data can be collected in a more culturally and ecologically valid framework.

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