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About Motivational Interviewing (MI)
Motivational Interviewing is a person-centered, directive
method for enhancing intrinsic motivation to change by
exploring and resolving ambivalence.

In the past, many counselors and criminal justice workers
have tried to get people to change through advocacy
methods such as coercion, persuasion, lecturing,
unsolicited or unilateral advice, authoritative or expert
stances, or emphasizing diagnostic labels. While some
of these methods can be effective at producing short-term
change, the change usually lasts only as long as criminal
justice sanctions require offender compliance.

Developed by William Miller & Steven Rollnick (1991), MI
is based on considerable treatment effectiveness research
from the ‘80s and 90’s. MI has succeeded where
advocacy-based interventions have failed, largely through
recognizing the different thought patterns and stages that people go through in the process of changing significant maladaptive behaviors. Its skills and principles enable clients to strengthen their commitment to changing maladaptive or anti-social behaviors by focusing on their own desire, self-efficacy, need, readiness, and reasons to change. Clients can pose their own best reasons for changing, and once committed, are better able to think of and enact realistic steps toward pro-social alternatives to current problems.

MI methods of interacting with clients often include:
  • Seeking to understand people’s frame of reference through reflective listening;
  • Expressing acceptance and affirmation;
  • Eliciting and selectively reinforcing people’s own expressions of problem recognition, concern, and desire,
    intention, and ability to change;
  • Monitoring people’s degree of readiness to change, and ensuring that resistance is not generated by
    jumping ahead of where a person is prepared to go; and
  • Affirming the people’s freedom of choice and self-direction.
MI does seek to "confront" clients with reality, but this method is more collaborative than aggressive styles of
confrontation.

MI has been applied to an extraordinary range of resistant populations: addicts, sex offenders, emergency room
intakes, medical patients, etc. Probation, parole, jail, and case management staff have used MI to achieve higher
quality assessment information, better engage their clients’ motivation to change criminogenic lifestyles, as well as
successfully negotiate client participation in supervision or treatment plans

J-SAT offers the following levels of MI trainings:

MI Fundamentals Training
Advanced MI Training
Training of MI Trainers
Interview Critiquer Training
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