Motivational interviewing 29 techniques

Practical application of motivational interviewing techniques with drug abusers... 

During motivational interviewing the therapist makes use of the above mentioned interventions. Putting these interventions to practical use means employing several techniques ... 

The interview technique used to reveal an individual s means-end chain, underpinning product choice, is called laddering (Reynolds and Gutman, 1984 and 1988). From the interview data hierarchical value maps were constructed based on an aggregation of individual ladders. Means-end chain analysis is useful in understanding consumer motivation but can lead to too few conceptual statements and for this reason the laddering interviews were supported by a series of focus groups. 

Yet another technique has been to interview children or adults (such as teachers, Sch fer Smith, 1996) directly, either using questionnaires (Smith et al., 1992), or interviews (Boulton, 1992a). Clearly, people s answers may not be accurate in terms of what we observe, but this method should inform us about what they think and perceive. This has it s own intrinsic interest, and also interest in terms of discrepancies between beliefs and behaviour. In the case of older children, especially adolescents, we may get uniquely useful insights, while bearing in mind the possible distortions due to selective perception and memory, limited insight to motivation, and social desirability in responses, that bear on verbal report data (Boulton, 1992a). 

This is a qualitative market research technique that sees a highly-skilled individual conducting an unstructured personal interview with a single respondent to probe underlying feelings, motives, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes. 

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