THE DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT INTERVIEW - TESTING THE PSYCHODYNAMIC ASSESSMENT VARIABLES

The Dynamic Assessment Interview (DAI) is a semi-structured interview with anchored scales to rate patients' suitability for psychodynamic p sychotherapy. The DAI was inspired by the Personality Assessment Inter view developed by Selzer et al. in 1987 and it introduces from the beg inning of the assessment interview an explicit focus on the patient's immediate interactions with the interviewer. Seven theoretical derived varables are assessed, namely psychological mindedness, capacity for self-observation, capacity for empathy tolerance of frustration, motiv ation, response to confrontation, and ability to contain and work with affect. In addition, the patient's attractiveness as a psychotherapy patient and his or her assumed confidence in the forthcoming treatment are assessed. The patient's personality organization nd modum Kernber g is measured from a global assessment of the interview. The present p aper describes the DAI and presents its psychometric properties. An ac ceptable level of inter-rater agreement was found for the theoreticall y derived variables and for the personality organization diagnosis, wi th intra-class correlations or kappa coefficients ranging from 0.68 to 0.80.