Overview
Psychological practitioners require skills in the direct – that is, face-to-face – assessment of people who may be ambivalent, if not reluctant, to engage in such a process. For example, they may be known or suspected perpetrators of violence or sexually harmful behaviour or pose risks in other ways that they may be reluctant to discuss openly. Psychological practitioners also require skills in indirect assessment, such as when a person refuses to engage, yet an evaluation is still required (e.g., for the assessment of self-directed harm) or when there are sound clinical reasons not to engage directly with the client, and third parties must be consulted. Thus, the principal skills required for practitioners are those for interviewing in direct assessments and for consultancy in indirect assessments. This one-day workshop aims to enhance these important and linked practice skills.
The morning session will focus on interviewing skills. These will include interview preparations and strategic planning, managing initial contacts and endings, and rapport building. Specific techniques will be examined, such as enquiring and changing topics (or conversational facilics), probing, observing, managing and riding resistance, and detecting and challenging anomalous accounts. The morning will conclude by examining how to adapt existing and new skills to more challenging interview situations, such as the direct assessment of people with severe personality difficulties or autism linked to problematic and intense interests. Brief case studies and exercises will be used to enhance learning and test skills.
The afternoon session will build on the skills already discussed and focus on their applications to professional consultancy related to the indirect assessment of people of concern. Skills will include consultancy preparation and planning, listening in a multidisciplinary team meeting, detecting and making sense of differences of professional opinion, assimilating diverse and possibly contradictory information, risk formulation and risk management planning, and communicating the findings of an evaluation. And again, case studies and exercises will be used to enhance learning and test skills.
This course is intended for experienced practitioners – trainees and qualified alike – who want an opportunity to reflect on these critical practice techniques in their own settings.
Learning Outcomes
- To enhance the awareness of attendees in interview strategies, styles and techniques, including their own
- To encourage the development of skills, such as conversational facilics in direct assessment interviews or consultation skills in indirect assessments
- To provide attendees with some exercises with which they may practice and observe developments in their interviewing competencies following the workshop
Presenter(s)
Dr. Caroline Logan
About the presenter(s)
Dr Caroline Logan is a Consultant Forensic Clinical Psychologist. She has worked as a lead consultant in high and medium secure forensic mental health services in the north of England, and as a consultant/contractor with law enforcement and threat assessment and management agencies in the UK and elsewhere for almost 30 years. She is also an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Manchester (from 2009, and before that, a senior research fellow then an honorary research fellow at the University of Liverpool between 1996-2009) and a scientist at the Kompetansesenter at Helse Bergen in Norway. Dr Logan has ongoing clinical and research interests in personality disorder and psychopathy, mental disorder and comorbidity, risk and threat assessment and management, violent extremism, and forensic clinical interviewing, and she has a special interest in gender issues in the range of offending and harmful behaviour. She has published five books and over 80 articles on these subjects, including Violent Extremism: A Handbook of Risk Assessment and Management, a book co-edited with Randy Borum and Paul Gill, published in November 2023, and a second edition of Managing Clinical Risk: A Guide to Effective Practice, co-edited with Lorraine Johnstone, published in December 2023. She has commenced work on a new book on violent extremism in youth with Professors Borum and Gill, and a book on personality problems and risk is in the pipeline.
Notes
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