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Interview Tape Critiquing
Tape critiques provide trained staff with the ongoing feedback they need to put into practice what they have learned in training. Whether your staff has been trained in basic Motivational Interviewing (MI) skills, advanced MI, or any kind of offender assessment, they need personalized, immediate reinforcement and feedback to implement their training effectively and long-term. Tape critiquing provides this essential follow-up feedback.

What Does Tape Critiquing Involve?

Each trained staff person makes an audio tape or VHS recording of an MI or an assessment interview conducted within a month or two after the initial training. Tapes and copies of any assessments generated from the interview are mailed to J-SAT.

At J-SAT, skilled critiquers listen for the following on each tape:
  1. Clinical Skills: The type and ratio of clinical skills used in the interview— closed and open questions, reflections, summaries, affirmations/support, eliciting change talk, teaching, and confrontation.
  2. Global Measures: An overall impression of the interview atmosphere according to the categories of Empathy, Genuineness, MI Spirit, Egalitarianism, Acceptance, and Warmth.
  3. Assessment Scoring: Identification of items that were incorrectly scored according to the assessment manual criteria, or not probed sufficiently to warrant confident scoring.
Observations from these three categories are summarized in a graphic/written format. Staff can compare their ratios for clinical skills and global measures to national and agency averages. Excesses or deficits in use of various clinical skills generate automated comments that provide suggestions for ways interviewers can achieve better balance. Better skill balances tend to lower client defensiveness, allowing for better information gathering or motivational enhancement. Global measure and scoring disagreement feedback is entirely personalized for each interview, allowing for nuanced comments based on personal style or difficulties.

Once interviewers have received their written reports, we also offer 30-minute phone coaching sessions in which interviewers can discuss any part of the interviewing process that has been difficult or confusing. Phone coaches help interviewers to practice skills that have been hard to master or can help them better manage difficult client issues.

We ensure that a minimum of 50% of the written and phone coaching comments are encouraging and supportive. We strive to find the positive things that interviewers have done and commend them before gently encouraging them to grow in other skill and assessment competencies. We know there can be many extraneous factors that inhibit optimum interviewing skills and we try our best to give interviewers the benefit of the doubt in each case. Our aim is always to encourage and praise your staff for work well done.

MI vs. Assessment Interview Critiques

We have two different computer programs for evaluating MI interviews and assessment interviews. The goal of assessment interviews is to lower client defensiveness so that the interviewer can get detailed, quality information. While reflections are important to avoiding long strings of questions that make clients feel interrogated, we understand that open and closed questions are essential to gathering information. Therefore, our assessment skill balance calculation looks for an equivalent proportion of open questions, closed questions, and reflections. The assessment feedback report focuses on techniques to lower client defensiveness and obtain better information for assessment scoring.

The goal of an MI-only interview is to explore client ambivalence and elicit client change talk. As reflections are the most important skill for facilitating this process, our clinical skill balance calculation for MI-only interviews rewards the use of twice as many reflections as questions. Because open questions allow for better client exploration, the calculation rewards the use of more open than closed questions. MI-only feedback reports emphasize techniques for better exploring ambivalence and eliciting change talk. They contain an additional graph breaking down client change talk into categories of reasons to change, desire, ability, need, commitment, and taking steps. Another chart shows how interviewers score according to Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI 2.0) scoring standards developed by Theresa Moyers, Tim Martin, Jennifer Manuel, and William Miller.

In addition to conducting tape critiques, J-SAT also trains tape critiquing. Click here to decide whether this option would better meet your agency’s quality assurance needs.

Setting Up Tape Critiquing

Before you contact us to set up the tape critique process, you may want to consider the following questions, as this information will help us to best serve you:
  • How many interviews will be critiqued over what period(s) of time?
  • Will they be of MI or Assessment interviews?
  • Which assessment will interviewers be using for their tapes?
  • Which person in your agency will be responsible for ensuring that interviews are submitted on time and meet the specifications in the interview tape submission form (see below)?
The following information may be helpful as you decide how to proceed:

Critique Turnaround Time:
  • One to two weeks. When your agency gives us advance communication regarding tape arrival dates and the number of tapes we should expect, we should be able to complete the critique and feedback process within one week. With shipping time, that means your staff should have their feedback within two weeks of completing their interviews. In cases where we receive an unexpected tape volume or are not notified in advance, we allow for two weeks for tape completion. Should you decide to send us tapes, we can work with your staff supervisors to avoid common tape recording, collection, and shipping delays.
Tape Critiquing and Phone Coaching Rates:
  • We charge $100 per critiqued interview, which includes critiquer listening time, reporting time, and the return shipping rate. For MI interviews, our 30-minute phone coaching session rate is $50 per session.
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