Is there a short-cut? An investigation into the life event interview

Forty-two men and 53 women patients at the Edinburgh Regional Poisoning Treatment Centre were interviewed, usually within 8-12 h of admission. The interview covered life events and difficulties from 6 months before admission. For 43 patients it was in 3 stages: 1) a list of life events and difficulties to be ticked, 2) standard probing questions about each situation ticked, 3) free flowing unstructured interviewing eliciting fuller contextual data about the situations. An independent rater scored the situations after each of the three stages, at each point being blind to information contained in subsequent stages. Four variables were scored designed to indicate the total number of life situations present, the number of situations containing either a long-term threat or personal loss element, an overall threat score and the total number of characteristics (1). The remaining 52 patients had a similar interview but containing an extra stage at the start. In this stage the patients were invited to tell the interviewer about any problems they had had in the last 6 months. Anything volunteered was probed freely before administration of the other three stages. The raters scored all four stages separately. No important differences in results from the two types of interview were found. For individual patients more than 80% of the life situation information found after the final free flow stage had been obtained by the end of the probe stage. Furthermore, the final stage took something between a third and a half the interview time. On the other hand, it was clear that it would be unreasonable to end the interview after either the first free flow or the list stages, and the gain in information from probe to final stage was highly significant and potentially important. For individual life situations 75% underwent no further change in rating after the probe stage. High though this figure is, it would not, in our view, warrant shortening the interview.