Evaluating skill acquisition in motivational interviewing: The developmentof an instrument to measure practice skills

Social work education has long emphasized the need to provide competence-ba sed education. However, little work has been done to identify, validate and evaluate competencies in specific fields such as addictions. The purpose o f this study was to isolate a set of substance abuse intervention competenc ies using Motivational Interviewing that could be used to teach and evaluat e students. The research proceeded in three stages. First, a modified Delph i approach involving social work practitioners was used to discern a set of positive and dysfunctional skills related to Motivational interviewing The primary researcher taught a graduate social work class aimed at teaching s tudents theory and skills related to this model. Students demonstrated thes e skills with simulated clients through videotaped interviews. Finally, thr ee observers rated the student interviews using this developed instrument. While inter-observer agreement was lower than anticipated, this study does provide early support for the development of competencies related to specif ic theoretical frameworks.