My goal as a psychologist has been to “enter the child's mind” — to discover as best I could how the child thinks, sees the world, constructs personal reality. Mostly I have operated as a researcher, trying to gain insight into such issues as the usually unrecognized learning potential of poor children. But I have also worked as a clinician, attempting to discover, for example, why a particular child is having difficulty with schoolwork. In both research and clinical work, I have found that the “clinical interview” is a powerful vehicle for entering the child's mind.

The clinical interview can provide a kind of “thick description” of the mind (to borrow from Geertz, 1973). The clinical interview — more than many standard procedures — gives me a chance of getting beyond the child's initial fear or defensiveness, of being sensitive to the cultural differences that separate us, of ensuring that the child understands the task I am presenting and that I understand the task the child decides to deal with, and of gaining some insight into the child's often hidden abilities. The clinical interview, I believe, provides me with more accurate information about children's minds than do standard procedures.

The phrase clinical interview refers to a class of flexible interview methods the nature of which is very hard to capture in a single phrase.