CHAPTER 9
Adult Development
as Seen throughthe Personal Interview
The interview is a venerable psychological technique with many vari-
ants: The clinical interview is used to gain diagnostic information; thetherapeutic interview , to help the client think through his or her prob-lems; Daniel Levinson’s “biographical interview ,” to gain a sense of theindividual’s life; the research interview , to gather data. Some interviews,such as those conducted by survey researchers and pollsters, are reallyquestionnaires administered verbally rather than in writing; of these wehave little to say , since they are essentially self-report instruments. Butmost interviews involve freer questioning at the discretion of the inter -
viewer, and most require judgments by a rater (who may or may not be
the interviewer) rather than simple tabulations of answers. It is thesesorts of interviews that we need to consider next, since they have playedan important role in theories of adult development.
As a technique for gathering information on personality , the inter -
view has a privileged status. Clinicians, who have always dominated
personality research and theory , are accustomed to talking directly topatients and to making diagnostic judgments about their condition; it isunderstandable that they would put particular faith in the results of in -
terviews. The same principles and practices that are used in therapeutic
interviews can be applied to normal subjects of pure research.
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