Interviewing For Assessment

A Practical Guide for School Psychologists and School Counselors

Michael Hass

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781119166863
• eBook ISBN: 9781119166948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An indispensable guide for school psychologists and school counselors on assessment interviewing

Assessment Interviewing is a collaborative, strengths-based approach to the subject that helps professionals develop the skills and knowledge necessary to effectively gather the information they need in order to assess children's social, emotional, and academic functioning.Practical and easy to read, it provides step-by-step guidelines for structuring interviews for different purposes, communicating respect and understanding, and strategies for gathering information from children of different ages, cultures, and social standings.

Chapter contains case studies and examples that illustrate how to clarify and classify problems, understand strengths and resources, appreciate the role of culture in interviews and respond to risk of suicide. The book concludes with a chapter on how to communicate the key information gathered into a comprehensive assessment or intervention plan.

• Addresses the unique interviewing needs of school-based professionals
• Features numerous practice exercises
• Provides strategies and guidelines for integrating the information gathered from interviews into a comprehensive assessment or intervention plan
• Includes interview protocols and end-of-chapter checklists

This book is an ideal resource for school-based practitioners and graduate courses in assessment, counseling, and seminars attached to fieldwork.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction to Interviewing for Assessment

Kelly is a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome. She is in a fourth-grade general education classroom with a one-on-one aide. Kelly has received special education services since she was 3 years old and has been evaluated several times. After her last reevaluation, her parents asked for further assessment because, in their words, the last evaluation had not done enough to identify Kelly's strengths and had focused too much on standardized test scores and not enough on her actual performance in the classroom. The report written following the prior evaluation indicated test scores as well as her teacher's general descriptions of her behavior in the classroom.

PURPOSE AND GOALS OF THIS BOOK

Kelly illustrates two points that will be important throughout this book. One is that, although the quantitative data produced by standardized tests and behavior rating scales can be valuable, they cannot by themselves provide a holistic picture of a child. For this, it is necessary to talk with Kelly and the people who know her best—her parents and her teachers—to ask them focused questions and listen well to produce a description of Kelly that is authentic and credible. The second point is that these conversations are not simply in the service of arriving at a diagnosis. No one doubts that Kelly has Down syndrome. In addition, in Kelly's case, no one doubts that she has at least a mild intellectual disability or difficulties expressing herself verbally. This information is easily available to us via scores on standardized tests. What we do not know, aside from these broad brushstrokes, is what her unique strengths and challenges are. My assertion in this book is that the best way to arrive at this knowledge is through interviewing both Kelly and the important adults in her life. My overall goal in writing this book is to assist practitioners in being able to do this with skill and confidence.

Interviewing has long been embraced by mental health professionals as a flexible way of gathering information from the clients they work with. Furthermore, interviewing is so ubiquitous in society at large that we are said to live in what Atkinson and Silverman (1997) called “the interview society.” One only has to watch the news on television or pick up a magazine to find interviews being used to deliver information, shed light on issues, or simply unveil the experiences of a popular personality.

The importance of interviewing lies in its flexibility to be used for different purposes. In psychological or educational assessment, it can be used to better understand someone's social and cultural context, clarify clients' concerns, determine a formal classification or diagnosis, and/or gather information important for developing solutions to problems (e.g., Beaver & Busse, 2000; Vacc & Juhnke, 1997; Watkins, Campbell, Nieberding, & Hallmark, 1995). Interviewing is such a pervasive part of what counselors and psychologists are expected to do that, as Whitcomb and Merrell (2013) point out, it has become part of the mystique of being a mental health professional. Although interviewing is not the X-ray superpower laypeople imagine it to be, it is hard to envision a day going by in the lives of counselors or psychologists when they do not gather information from students, parents, or teachers by having conversations with them. This importance is reflected in the quantity of literature available on interviewing. For example, a search of the electronic catalog at the university where I teach, using the term clinical interviewing yielded almost 1,300 books and nearly 49,000 journal articles.

Yet despite its presence in the literature and apparent importance as a professional competency, interviewing is often an underutilized part of the assessment process, at least among school-based practitioners. Over the past several years, I have read dozens of psycho-educational evaluation reports and interacted with hundreds of participants in professional development workshops I lead. Although this is certainly limited data, my observation is that, although interviewing has been described as “the hallmark of assessment processes and perhaps the most common method used to obtain information to evaluate individuals” (Busse & Beaver, 2000, p. 235), it seems to take a back seat to other forms of evaluation data such as standardized tests.

At least some research supports this conclusion. For example, the results of a survey of 214 practicing school psychologists found that even with evaluations of children suspected of having the educational classification of Emotional Disturbance, a student interview was one of the most excluded assessment methods (Allen & Hanchon, 2013). This is especially striking given that the focus of evaluations to decide Emotional Disturbance is on social, behavioral, and emotional functioning; this emphasis calls for interviews of children, parents, and teachers.

In part, the underutilization of interviewing may be because interviewing for assessment demands a unique blend of both interpersonal skills and professional knowledge (Sattler, 1998; Whitcomb & Merrell, 2013). For example, to be competent at interviewing requires that practitioners possess knowledge of typical and atypical child development, formal classification systems (e.g., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSM], American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act [IDEIA], 2004; etc.) as well as the communication skills needed to flexibly respond to the demands of persons of different ages, persons with different social and emotional challenges, and persons with varied social and cultural backgrounds. This includes skills for fostering a collaborative relationship and skillful questioning strategies. School-based practitioners must also have a good understanding of learning, curriculum, and pedagogy. This unique combination of skills and knowledge can make interviewing for assessment difficult to learn and practice well.

Nonetheless, skillful interviewing is critical to being an effective school counselor or school psychologist and a fundamental part of the assessment process. Given its importance, the goal of this book is to help students and practitioners learn to be more comfortable and skillful using interviews to gather information from children, parents, and teachers. A secondary goal is for readers to better understand how interviews can be used with other assessment methods as part of a comprehensive assessment.

The ideas discussed here are drawn from my 35 years' experience as a school psychologist and psychotherapist, much of that spent working with children and youth with social, emotional, and behavioral challenges. It also comes from my nearly 20 years as an educator of school counselors and school psychologists and my efforts to better understand and teach the ideas and skills that are now part of this book. The outcome of this experience is several big ideas that form the basis of this book and the approach to interviewing that I advocate.

BIG IDEAS OF THIS BOOK

Interviewing for Assessment and Intervention, Not Just Diagnosis

Much of the literature on interviewing focuses on clinical interviewing. As Whitcomb and Merrell (2013) point out, the term clinical interviewing describes interviewing for the purpose of gathering information about behavioral, social, and emotional functioning in order to better understand problems in these areas. Broadly interpreted, this definition seems appropriate for both clinical and educational settings. Unfortunately, much of the literature on clinical interviewing more narrowly places a premium on accurate diagnosis with the assumption that this will lead to clear treatment recommendations. This logic is derived from the medical model with its emphasis on diagnosis and the close relationship between accurate classification and treatment (Kamphaus, Dowdy, Kim, & Chin, 2013). This approach, when applied to the kinds of human problems that mental health practitioners deal with, has been criticized on both philosophical and practical grounds (e.g., De Jong & Kim Berg, 2013; Kamphaus et al., 2013; Kraemer, 2014; Lopez et al., 2006; Sheridan & Gutkin, 2000).

These critiques, and the strengths and weaknesses of formal diagnoses based on a medical model, will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 8, but what is important for the moment is that these criticisms seem especially salient in school-based practice, where the viewpoint is more ecological and the emphasis is on problem-solving and prevention of problems (Burns, 2011). As Sheridan and Gutkin (2000) state it, “By focusing almost exclusively upon child/pathology-related factors, the medical model leads ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• CHAPTER 1: Introduction to Interviewing for Assessment
• CHAPTER 2: Interviews as Part of a Comprehensive Assessment
• CHAPTER 3: Steps in Interviewing for Assessment
• CHAPTER 4: Interviewing Strategies
• CHAPTER 5: The School-Based Mental Status Exam
• CHAPTER 6: Interviewing Culturally Diverse Interviewees
• CHAPTER 7: Strategies for Interviewing Young Children
• CHAPTER 8: Interviewing to Clarify and Classify Problems
• CHAPTER 9: Interviewing About Academic Performance
• CHAPTER 10: Interviewing to Understand Strengths and Resources
• CHAPTER 11: Interviewing in High-Risk Situations: Suicide Assessment
• CHAPTER 12: Pulling It All Together and Communicating the Results of Assessment Interviews
• APPENDIX 1: Child and Adolescent Interview Protocol
• APPENDIX 2: Questions About Language and Culture
• APPENDIX 3: Process of Deferential Diagnosis
• APPENDIX 4: School-Based Mental Status Evaluation
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• End User License Agreement