ABSTRACT
The appointment to the staff of social workers with psychiatric training was predicated on the belief that they, more than any other group, possessed techniques particularly well-suited for the type of interviewing we planned to undertake. Social workers are trained to elicit information of an emotional nature from people who usually hesitate to talk with strangers about intimate details. However, there was this difference between the interviewing techniques typical of social agencies and our research needs. The inactive files of the district offices of the New York State Employment Service gave us our control cases—families of the same socioeconomic background as our Relief sample, except that they had never been in receipt of public assistance. To check on the fact that the family had never been on Relief, the names secured from the State Employment Service were cleared through the Social Service Exchange.
