Reliability and Authenticity in Interviews with Teens Posted on November 21, 2007 Elizabeth L. George (bio) describes specific techniques for training researchers to work with teens.

When we are training someone to do the interviews, we have to make sure first that they're comfortable with the measure, and so we train them in the measure by having them watch videotape, they can do role-playing, they have to rate the measures. We do lots of training sessions. In fact, everybody from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati is coming out to Boulder in the fall, so we have these big training meetings where we go through all of the measures and make sure that everybody feels comfortable with them.

Then we have the person who's being trained observe another person giving the measure and rating it so that we can compare afterwards and see if there are questions and those kinds of things. Then we have them do the interview while somebody's sitting in and observing them giving the interview. And then I will still want to listen to tapes a couple of times, but we also do a lot of reliability ratings.

So other people will be listening to the tapes just to make sure that they're asking the questions in a way that makes sense, that they're making good ratings that we can trust and rely on. And we have very good inter-rater reliability with the system that we use. So by the time people are trained in the measure, they really have to know what they're doing before we let them do that.

So that's the practical piece of it, and there's the interpersonal piece of it too because teenagers are pretty unforgiving. If you make an error or you make them angry, you're done. You get one chance, maybe two, and then you're done. So it has to be a certain type of person, too, and I talk to the teens I work with the same way I'm talking to you. I'm just very real, very much like, this is who I am, this is what I'm here to do. And we just go for it.

And if they have questions for me, I answer them. Of course I'm careful about not answering, because teens like to get into your head too, so you don't want to answer things that aren't appropriate to answer. And I'm really clear that this is to be helpful to them. Whether they see it that way or not, which is certainly their opinion, my goal is really try to figure out what's going on for them so I can ultimately be helpful.

It doesn't hurt that we pay them $40 for the interview that we do. That's a big incentive for them. But we really need people to do the interview that can make a good connection with the teen, and I'm almost a little more concerned usually about making a good connection with the teen than I am with the parents. The parents know why they're there. The parents have the information. The teen is really trying to figure out, "Is this a place where I can feel safe? Is this a place where I can connect and talk to this person?"

And so there are a lot of people in our field who are brilliant, brilliant people, but stiff in the interpersonal interaction. And so I have to work with those people a little bit more if that's what's going on. And then some people who have their own issues that they bring to the table that you have to really make sure that those don't start operating in the interview. But for the most part we've been really lucky with the grad students that we've had. They've been really great and the people that we've trained.

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