Participant comfort and disclosure in intake assessment practice

¶ … Interview

Intake Interview

The overall experience of conducting the intake assessment was a good and enlightening one. The interview itself felt very open and relaxed as my choice of the interviewee was a stranger, so there were no prior associative anxieties for either of us. Also, the interviewee seemed to have a very vivid imagination and attention to detail which helped in making the interview in-depth and thorough. During conducting the interview I felt like a natural in not only communicating the questions but in also taking down the notes on all the answers with important key words that I could clearly understand even after the interview ended. Another aspect I experienced as an interviewer was my ability to actually frame a few additional questions based on the response of the interviewee and not shying away from asking for help when I needed it -- whether this was in terms of asking for clarifications or definitions, etc.

Throughout the whole intake assessment, the most comfortable aspects for me included recording all the data and answers that were being given to me. Being a writer at heart, I thought initially that it might be hard for me to edit down the answer, but when it came down to crunch time in the interview, the pointers I made from start to finish actually helped me polish the final draft of the interview write-up. On the other hand, the least comfortable aspect for me was going around and selecting an interviewee. I felt like I needed someone who I did not know so that the interview would be candid to an extent, however, at the same time I also felt that there was no way of knowing how to approach a complete stranger and demanding a candid session with an intake interview/assessment that required such personal insight into one's life.

Thus, in trying to counter the least comfortable aspects, I resorted to designing a particular 'style' or approach to the interview. I first looked over the questions thoroughly so if I was to encounter a brief session with a stranger where they asked about the sort of questions they would have to answer, I could honestly tell them some of the questions from the designated interview questions. This ensured that I would have an honest style approach. Furthermore, I decided to remain friendly and candid on a personal level -- revealing some aspects that were uncomfortable to me in relation to the interview so that the interviewee could relate to the awkwardness of the situation. Similarly, I wanted to add the reasons why I felt such an intake assessment was necessary so that the interviewee was able to gauge the kind of value I gave to the assessment. This style allowed me to put the interviewee first and allowed me to make him comfortable with the process from the get-go. Also, ensuring complete anonymity was part of my approach so as to ensure the interviewee that the assessment was purely for research purposes and no judgment would be passed on their account for revealing truthful aspects of their lives.

Some of my strengths in conducting an intake assessment include my writing and my style or approach to the interview. As aforementioned, one of my areas of concerns before conducting the intake assessment was that I would not be able to stop myself from writing every detail word by word as spoken by the interviewee. However, that was not the case as I was able to very accurately and efficiently able to jot down the main points with important key words from the beginning all the way through the end. Also, another important strength of mine was the style or approach I adopted in conducting the interview. Even though it was a thought-through process, it seemed t come naturally to me to be a friendly and yet professional interviewer. I did not cross any privacy lines and I also was able to make the interviewee comfortable with the process so much so that he did not feel the need to edit his answers but provided vivid explanations and details to each questions asked.

One of the main areas of improvement could be to lead the interview as the interviewer. I felt that sometimes the interviewee was the one guiding the overall discussion and I did not know how to take back the control and flow of the interview except through maybe changing the question. I would definitely need to develop more managerial skills in this particular aspect so as to avoid losing control over the flow of the interview next time around.

In my opinion, the best and worst thing about the outline provided was the fact that it was extremely thorough and required significant detail. There seemed to be too many open-ended questions in the intake assessment that required complete dependence upon the interviewee. This led the majority of the quality of the assessment to be dependent upon the interviewee as well. Also, the overall structure of the intake assessment seemed haphazard to me whereby I felt that certain aspects were unnecessary to really ask over and over again especially when it came to the health concerns of the individual. If I had the luxury, I would probably remove a few designated questions and add a few more close-ended questions whereby I could give the interviewee a social scenario and ask questions in accordance to it, record his answers and conduct a theoretical assessment or comparison thereafter. The reason behind doing this would be as to ensure that the interview process had some relevance to the current trends and added some quality information to the current literature on the topic.