Chapter 15 - Structured Clinical Interviews for Adults

Abstract

This chapter discusses structured clinical interviews for adults. For many years, clinical interview has been used as a primary source of information about patients. Information obtained in the clinical interview has been used to determine diagnosis and select treatment interventions. This has been true despite the observations made in systematic studies of the clinical interview showing that it often produced unreliable or even misleading data. More recently, there has been a concerted effort to address two sources of undependable information about diagnoses and they are the development of operationally defined diagnostic decision rules (DSM-III, DSM-III-R, and DSM-IV) to reduce criterion variance and development of structured interviews to reduce information variance. Structured diagnostic interviews have been used extensively in clinical and epidemiological research. The availability of personal computers is leading to their increased use in patient self-administration of various structured interviews, including psychosocial history interviews and diagnostic interviews. It is possible to predict with confidence that diagnostic criteria will continue to evolve and change until laboratory correlates of diagnoses are identified. Finally, it is also possible to predict that the use of structured interviews (computer-administered) in clinical practice, as well as research, will expand dramatically because of the wealth of information they provide the clinician.