CHAPTER 4 106 Results showed that to establish a collaborative atmosphere, the interviewer used personal actions like sharing personal information or telling jokes. This fits with the concept of ‘therapeutic use of self’ which consists of the use of intentional (non) verbal behaviour and reactions to: 1) work transparent, allowing the client to see the therapists affective responses; 2) disclose information about the therapists himself or 3) disclose thoughts about and reactions to the client (Knight, 2012). The use of self has been recognized as being an important factor in developing a therapeutic relationship (Andolfi et al., 1993; Baldwin, 2013; Knight, 2012; Lum, 2002), which is recognizable in the current study. In order to be effective in the therapeutic use of self, professionals need to combine professional knowledge with personal knowledge and awareness (Edwards & Bess, 1998). Therefore, we suggest that professionals communicating with children are not only trained on the level of techniques or skills, but also in the therapeutic use of self. A strength of this study is that professionals with different backgrounds performed the analyses: a speech-language pathologist, paediatric psychologist, (paediatric) occupational therapist and neuropsychologist were involved in the analysis. Although the sample of children observed in this study is small, the videos consisted of 12 hours of conversation material between the professional and the children which can be seen as a reasonable amount of data. Another strength is that this study focused on both tailoring communication to the child and to the desired outcome. This link made it possible to also give indications of when the alignment was successful. Nonetheless, further research to the topic of adapting the communication to the child is needed. In conclusion, this study contributes to the knowledge of a tailor-made way of interviewing children to uncover the child’s perspective. We found that it is important to match the type of questions to the communication level of the child. Besides, interviewer skills and techniques can be customized by adapting to the child’s responses, preferences, or communication abilities. By our knowledge, this is the first attempt, on providing a decision-algorithm for tailor-made interviewing. We suggest to further study its usability and effectiveness. Acknowledgements We would like to thank Pleuntje van Wijck for support with the data-analysis. In memoriam Researcher Esther Steultjens contributed extensively during this study, but was no longer with us finalizing the report. Her input during the research was extremely valuable.
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