ABSTRACT
The most omnipresent and ubiquitous clinical technique is undoubtedly the interview. All people have had some personal experience with the interview in some connection or other. Individually administered psychological tests can be considered a form of interview, in this instance a standardized form in which all clients are asked essentially the same questions in a carefully prescribed order and manner. One of the first steps in the interviewing process is to allow the client to state his problem as he sees it or to present his reasons for consulting the agency or the individual practitioner. In some institutional settings, either the intake social worker or the intake psychiatrist might be more inclined to secure certain kinds of information, considered as basic for an applicant, than might be the case in other situations. Because the interview has been used for so many purposes, it is difficult to generalize about its effectiveness for clinical work.
