The Dynamic Assessment Interview: testing the psychodynamic assessment variables

The Dynamic Assessment Interview (DAI) is a semi-structured interview with anchored scales to rate patients; suitability for psychodynamic psychotherapy. The DAI was inspired by the Personality Assessment Interview developed by Selzer et al. in 1987 and it introduces from the beginning of the assessment interview an explicit focus on the patient's immediate interactions with the interviewer. Seven theoretical derived variables are assessed, namely psychological mindedness, capacity for self-observation, capacity for empathy, tolerance of frustration, motivation, response to confrontation, and ability to contain and work with affect. In addition, the patient's attractiveness as a psychotherapy patient and his or her assumed confidence in the forthcoming treatment are assessed. The patient's personality organization ad modum Kernberg is measured from a global assessment of the interview. The present paper describes the DAI and presents its psychometric properties. An acceptable level of inter-rater agreement was found for the theoretically derived variables and for the personality organization diagnosis, with intra-class correlations or kappa coefficients ranging from 0.68 to 0.80.