Assignment 5

Assignment 3

Walden University

Linda Dotson

Professor Vermillion

Capstone

December 15, 2019

Assignment 3

Interviewing is a fundamental skill in the field of human services. Human services professionals have to make daily choices on the specific interviewing strategies to use. This helps them to best meet the needs of a wide diversity of clients. This paper examines the purpose of knowing and using different styles of an interview. The paper also explores the kinds of specific behaviors a professional would engage in while conducting interviews.

A human services professional helps clients by providing the required daily support. Effective interviewing skills enable human services professionals to communicate with clients and quickly ascertain the problems they face. Human services professionals usually spend a lot of time interviewing clients and trying to assist them. A human services professional can either chose to use either structured interviews or unstructured interviews. This depends on the situation of the client being interviewed .

Structured interviews involve reading the questions exactly as they appear in the interview guide. The type of questions asked in a structured interview is often fixed (close-ended) in advance, though open-ended questions can also be included. A structured interview also standardizes the order in which questions are asked by the human services professional. The questions asked are always answered within the same context. The purpose of the structured interviews is to ensure that each interview is presented with exactly the same questions in the same order. This will ensure that answers can be reliably aggregated hence the counselor can be able to easily find out the solution to the problem facing the client.

Unstructured interviews help the human services professional to understand the behavior of individuals (Doody & Noonan, 2013). The questions asked to occur in a natural course of an interaction between the human services professional and the client. The human services professional follow the narrations of a respondent then comes up with questions from them, although the professional may have a list of questions as a guideline. Unstructured interviews are undertaken for the purpose of collecting data about the cognitive processes and experiences of a client (Jones, 2010). The questions asked by the human services professional are largely unscripted. The human services professional aims at collecting data that may help him/her to effectively address the needs of the client.

The human services professional should have a well-developed understanding of an issue facing the client (Bui et al., 2015). This will allow him/her to come up with a highly structured interview guide that will provide a client with meaningful, appropriate and relevant response categories to choose from for each question. Structured interviews are, therefore, appropriate to be used when there is an adequate understanding of a problem facing the client (Tolin et al., 2018).

Unstructured interviews might be used there is a need to allow clients to give their own answers. It is also suitable when there is a need to modify questions depending on the answers given by the clients. Questions can also be added or eliminated in the course of the interview. Unstructured interviews might also be used when there is a need to allow clients to answer questions asked in some profundity with their own choice of words. This can in turn aid the professional to have an insight on how the client understands the issues facing him /her. Unstructured interviews might also be suitable when there is a need to create qualitative data. Finally, I can use the unstructured interview when I want to inquire more about the issues facing the client. This will give me an opportunity to get an in-depth understanding and clarification.

It is important for a human service professional to analyze first the problem presented by the client. This will enable him to understand the problem and also examine the extent of the problem. This is also significant in determining the appropriate interviewing technique to be adopted by the professionals. Human services professionals should always strive to use the types of interviews that are appropriate for the client. This will enable human services professionals to come up with the best recommendations for solving the problem facing a client.

References

Bui, E., Mauro, C., Robinaugh, D. J., Skritskaya, N. A., Wang, Y., Gribbin, C., ... & Zisook, S. (2015). The structured clinical interview for complicated grief: reliability, validity, and exploratory factor analysis. Depression and anxiety, 32(7), 485-492.

Doody, O., & Noonan, M. (2013). Preparing and conducting interviews to collect data.

Jones, K. D. (2010). The unstructured clinical interview. Journal of Counseling & Development, 88(2), 220–226.

Tolin, D. F., Gilliam, C., Wootton, B. M., Bowe, W., Bragdon, L. B., Davis, E., ... & Hallion, L. S. (2018). Psychometric properties of a structured diagnostic interview for DSM-5 anxiety, mood, and obsessive-compulsive and related disorders. Assessment, 25(1), 3-13.

�Good details! Helpful introductory information provided for the reader.

�Good insight!

�Sometimes we will have to use structured interviews, as they may be required for funding sources, regulatory requirements and accreditation requirements. In these cases, there also may be a time frame regarding when a completed structured interview would need to be documented.

�Great critical thinking supported by references.

�I agree with your comments! The use of an unstructured interview will allow the use of open-ended questions. These questions can generate answers which provide additional information regarding the client's feelings and thoughts.

�Great planning!

�Well-researched!