Interviewing and counseling skills. Techniques for their evaluation

Assessment of knowledge and cognitive skills has been traditionally included in examinations for certification and licensure of health professionals. Evaluation techniques for assessing complex cognitive and interpersonal skills, however, have not been as widely developed or incorporated in national examination programs. Specifically, the evaluation of interviewing and counseling skills has been complicated by difficulties in: (a) defining what consititutes skillful interviewing and counseling and in specifying criteria against which performance can be assessed; (b) developing evaluation procedures to permit accurate and reliable observations of these activities; (c) solving logistic problems of standardizing the content and format of these evaluation procedures; and (d) establishing standards for identifying individuals who have not yet achieved acceptable levels of proficiency. Progress has been made in defining the criteria for evaluating the interviewing and counseling skills of several categories of health professionals. Definitions can be developed to identify specific behaviors associated with acceptable and unacceptable skills in this area of professional competence. On the basis of these definitions, interaction analysis techniques have been developed for accurate and reliable recording of behavior as it occurs in an interviewing and counseling session. Moreover, the use of actors programmed to portray the roles of patients has enabled the standardization of this evaluation procedure so that examinees can be assessed on the basis of equivalent testing conditions. A number of research studies are under way to determine whether paper-and-pencil, as well as audiovisual, simulations can be substituted for evaluation in a live, interactive setting. However, little has yet been done to identify appropriate procedures for establishing standards of proficiency. Perhaps such efforts will be more feasible when appropriate evaluation techniques are more fully developed. Of relevance in determining whether the evaluation of counseling and interviewing skills is pertinent to dietetics are questions such as: How frequently do dietitians interact with patients? In what settings and for what purposes do these interactions take place? What impact do dietitian-patient interactions have on the quality of the health care provided?