An Interactional Analysis of Clinical Interviewing

By Andrea A. diSessa. 2007

131 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Clinical interviewing is viewed here as a social interactional pattern in order to examine the nature and limits of the technique as a means of scientific data acquisition. I defend the technique against criticisms that it is ecologically suspect and prone to systematic biases, mainly due to influence of the interviewer on the interviewee or to unnatural and biasing interactional patterns. The Central Hypothesis of this work is that at least some forms of clinical interviewing are derivative of naturally occurring patterns of activity and interaction. As such, they do not warrant unnecessary a priori suspicion. More importantly, this view leads to avenues of empirical examination that allow determination and checking of the character of the clinical interaction, which bears directly on how and when data extracted in clinical contexts are scientifically valid. Data from an extensive corpus involving a single subject are used to illustrate and substantiate claims.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Family Practice, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd2e3e4d2c0ee3f294dc2730e72dc8f6ecfd6151

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Family Practice

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

The Challenge of Formative Assessment in Mathematics Education: Children’s Minds, Teachers’ Minds (2009, background): “In everyday discourse, it is quite natural to ask the kind of follow-up question that is needed to illuminate responses to standard tests [diSessa, 2007].”
Elementary children's judgments of the epistemic status of sources of justification† (2011, background): “Our view is that such attunements clearly have some cognitive basis, and that constructs like “knowledge” are needed to explain the regularity of individual behavior across situations, or the reliable differences between, for example, experts and novices in the same contexts (diSessa, 2007).”
Synthesis of Discipline-Based Education Research in Physics. (2014, background): “Others argue that cognitive clinical interviews are derivative of naturally occurring forms of interaction and are thus ecologically valid [466], or that the quality of the information obtained is partly dependent on students’ perception of the nature of the discourse interaction [121].”
Framing in cognitive clinical interviews about intuitive science knowledge: Dynamic student understandings of the discourse interaction (2012, background): “…about intuitive science knowledge: Student understanding of the discourse interaction Cognitive clinical interviews have long been and continue to be used extensively by researchers in the science education community (e.g., diSessa, 2007; Posner & Gertzog, 1982; Wolff-Michael Roth, 2008).”
Some Assembly Required: How Scientific Explanations Are Constructed during Clinical Interviews. (2012, background): “First, we have attempted to be clear that we see our clinical interviews as themselves a variety of social context (diSessa, 2007).”
Embodied design: constructing means for constructing meaning (2009, background): “The semiotic approach also relaxes tensions in the clinical-interview paradigm (e.g., diSessa 2007; Ginsburg 1997), because the approach explicitly acknowledges the nature and implications of the inherently discursive interaction through which the data under investigation are elicited.”
The marginalized identities of sense-makers: Reframing engineering student retention (2010, methodology): “Downey and Lucena (2003) use an ethnographic case study “to examine and describe the dominant tradition in engineering education from the students’ points of view” (p.”