The purpose of the present study was to determine the psychometric properties of a crisis intervention assessment instrument, The Crisis Intervention Semi-Structured Interview (CISSI; Kulic, 2001). The CISSI was designed to be accurate and complex enough for use by experienced clinicians, while remaining concrete and reliable enough to be used by beginning clinicians and others inexperienced in crisis intervention. Crisis intervention is defined as any situation in which a client presents to a clinician in a state that the safety of the client and/or others may be at risk. The target audience for the current instrument is the inexperienced clinician in a crisis situation. |Forty-seven novice clinicians participated in the current study. The subjects watched a videotaped analogue client in crisis being interviewed, and completed the CISSI based on the data the client provided. Subjects then watched a second videotaped analogue client present a monologue, and made a decision whether that client should or should not be psychiatrically hospitalized. The results of the CISSI were analyzed and the CISSI appears to possess acceptable reliability, depending on the type of client assessed. The results of the hospitalization decisions subjects made when using the CISSI and when using clinical judgment were compared, and it was found that, on average, more accurate dispositional decisions were made when subjects utilized the CISSI, than when utilizing clinical judgment alone. |Two of the CISSIs major scales, Depression/Suicide and Psychosis/Homicide, were compared against two valid and reliable instruments, the Scale for Suicide Ideation (Beck, Kovacs, & Weisman, 1979) and the Manchester Scale (Krawiecka, Goldberg, & Vaughan, 1977), and were found to possess acceptable convergent validity. Subjects also completed a second instrument, the Crisis Intervention Self-Efficacy Scale (CISES; Kulic, 2001), which was constructed to measure a clinicians level of crisis intervention self-efficacy. Crisis intervention self-efficacy was compared to hospitalization decisions based upon subjects results on the CISSI, and for clinical judgment alone, and no difference was found between subjects with high and low self-efficacy. It is concluded that the Crisis Intervention Semi-Structured Interview is a promising instrument for use by the novice clinician in assessing clients in crisis.