Assignment: Create an Interview Guide

Directions: During the first week of class you conducted your first practice interview.  You have since had the opportunity to learn about the formal process of interviewing and the techniques used in interviewing. With this new information in mind, it is time to develop a detailed plan for your second interview, which you may conduct face-to-face or over the telephone. Your second interview is broken down into two parts.

A. The first portion, preparing for the interview.

B. The second part of this assignment, conducting and analyzing the interview.

For this week you will be completing A. You will need to:

1. Locate a Volunteer:

He/she will play the role of "client" seeking help for persistent headaches and problems sleeping. The person you interview can be someone you know personally or you can contact your classmates through the Student Lounge to arrange to interview one another.

a. The client believes that stress may be part of the problem with his/her symptoms.  Remember that this is a role play, and your volunteer should be aware that this is a practice interview and not a real psychological interview.

b. Prior to conducting your interview, ask your volunteer to think about stress that s/he can discuss related to the client's problems (e.g., your client may think about stress from a job or stress related to a relationship with a significant other). However, DO NOT have your volunteer discuss this stress with you prior to the interview. You want to be able to explore this topic in depth during your interview. This scenario is intentionally left open-ended in order to allow students to maximize opportunity to utilize interview skills during the interview.

2. Create an Interview Guide:

a. In order to achieve a quality interview, you will need to first plan your interview, which is this week's assignment.

b. The purpose of your interview is to gather in-depth information to aid in diagnosis and treatment planning for the client.  You will need to gather detailed information about the symptoms being reported for both headaches and sleep problems (e.g., How often are the headaches occurring?  How long do they last?  What do they feel like?  Has any treatment helped?  Is there any pattern to the headaches?).  You will also need to present a complete picture of the patient.  What is the patient's gender, age, marital status, and employment status?  Be sure to go beyond these example questions, and provide an in-depth, highly detailed interview with your client.

Interview Guide Topics

The Interview Guide should directly address the below topics.  Use each of these topics as headings within your paper to ensure that you directly respond to each.  You should respond with at least a paragraph for each topic/heading.

1. Identify and summarize the purpose of your interview. How will the information you gather be used?

2. Explain how you will structure the interview and your reasoning behind the structuring of the interview. Include a list of topics you plan to cover.

3. Compose the questions you will use to obtain the information (develop a minimum of 15-20 questions). Be sure that you develop a minimum of 5 open and 5 closed ended questions.

4. Develop a minimum of 5 examples of paraphrasing, summaries, or reflections techniques that could be used during your interview (must have at least one of each paraphrase, summary, and reflection). When you conduct your actual interview, these exact examples you create may not fit depending on the responses of your interviewee, but it is important to start thinking now about how you will incorporate these techniques.  For this Interview Guide assignment, develop hypothetical examples of each type of technique.

5. Identify the opening techniques you will utilize to build rapport with the volunteer/client.

6. Identify types/examples of questions you want to avoid during interview.

Include an Analysis Summary:

In addition to the Interview Guide include an analysis (2-3 paragraphs) of your own preliminary thoughts about this client based on the limited information you have about this client. Have you ever known a person with chronic headaches or sleep problems? What is your "gut reaction" to hearing about a patient with chronic headaches and problems sleeping? That the person is a complainer? Is he/she a victim of terrible illness? Spend some time examining your thoughts and attitudes. It is normal for all of us to make at least preliminary assumptions about everyone we come in to contact with, and a good interviewer has awareness of his or her preliminary assumptions. Include the following in your analysis:

a. Identify your own beliefs (sympathetic, unsympathetic, or some mixture of both) and explain how these could affect your interview. Do you think that your beliefs are influenced by your own age, cultural, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity?

b. Identify steps you can take to limit the impact of your own beliefs on the interview. Be as specific as possible.

Start planning now! Remember that you will need a volunteer to role play your client. Work on identifying that person now and scheduling your interview well in advance to avoid any possible scheduling delays. You will also need to audio or video record the interview so that you can later transcribe the interview. Make sure you have access to the equipment you will need.