Computer aided interviewing in psychiatric social work

Summary This paper describes a research project on the process of collecting information for psychiatric social history. Subjects were patients' parents. Ten subjects were interviewed by computer and fourteen by persons. Unstructured interviews were obtained from old social histories. Structured interviewing collected significantly more information than unstructured interviewing. A comparison of structured human and computer interviews showed greater extremes of response with fewer discrepancies of fact in the computer condition, indicating greater candidness of subjects in that group and therefore greater validity of data collected by computer.