From counseling to interviewing... what we can learn from motivational interviewing.

As a young detective, I was taught to think of an interview on a sliding scale. My senior colleagues suggested that I think of 0 as a complete lie and 100 being absolute truth. My job, as it was explained to me, was to use whatever tactics I could to get the person being interviewed to 51 on this imaginary scale. The theory was that as soon as I got them to cross that threshold, they would open up and tell me what I wanted to know.

It turns out that getting somebody to talk to you has more to do with them than it does with you, the interviewer. This revelation was initially discovered by XXXX and XXXX as they conducted their work with people suffering from addiction. What they found was that like the old adage about a thirsty horse, the decision whether or not to change had to be motivated by the person themselves and couldn't be forced by the counselor or clinician.

These concepts