The Clinical Child Interview

In recent years, it has become well-accepted that children's thoughts and feelings mediate their behavioral difficulties. The clinical child interview is uniquely suited to assessing these internal events, collectively referred to as the child's subjective experience. Because at varying ages children possess different cognitive and linguistic skills and differ in psychosocial development, the child interviewer must be familiar with child development and skilled in interviewing strategies that accommodate these characteristics. An ideal resource for those who work with children, this volume offers a detailed description of developmentally sensitive interview approaches and strategies that permit children to competently share their rich subjective experience with the interviewer.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first section, the potential benefits of the child interview are discussed, and research on the reliability and validity of the child interview is summarized. The controversial issue of children's suggestibility is addressed, and ways for reducing it are extrapolated from research on children's eyewitness testimony.
The second section covers interviewing within the context of three theoretical orientations in child assessment: psychodynamic, psychometric, and behavioral. Illustrated with case examples, interview strategies consistent with each approach are reviewed and evaluated. The third section focuses on disorder-specific interviewing children presenting with either internalizing or externalizing disorders. These chapters demonstrate how information from the interview can be integrated with other assessment information to increase the completeness and treatment utility of the assessment. Throughout, case studies and extended interview excerpts illustrate how interview data contribute to diagnosis, case conceptualization, and treatment planning.

Providing the most up-to-date information on assessment techniques that are tied to empirical research in child development, this book is an invaluable reference for child clinical psychologists, school psychologists, pediatric psychologists, and child mental health professionals. It also serves as a text for graduate-level courses in child assessment and child therapy.

Jan N. Hughes , Dept. of Psychology, Texas A + M University.