According to Adams, Ball, Cassell, Krasny, Mccrory, Powell, and Sugarman (1999), it is customary to obtain an informed consent when doing medical research. They argued that the legal, moral, and ethical foundation exists to secure the participants’ agreement to be asked questions about their physical, psychological, and emotional state. Simple logic suggests that personal questions, especially questions about the condition like HIV/AIDS, have the potential to disturb the mental balance of the participant, and in the best-case scenario render them inaccurate in their answers.
Without proper emotional preparation and setting the conducive environment (free of interruptions, private), the researcher’s efforts to gain information would be jeopardized (Fisher, 2002). Moreover, and to the common sense, during sensitive verbal communication, it is imperative for the researcher be aware of a) verbal, b) non-verbal, c) inconsistency in verbal, and inconsistency in non-verbal communication (Ivey and Ivey, 2007). These authors offered a direct rational and a few examples. Empirically, when verbal communication is present, one has to be aware of what exactly is communicated.
The assumption that the listener has exactly the same definitions that were intended by the speaker can lead to misunderstanding and confusion. To avoid such I can suggest simple comprehension checks or requests to paraphrase what was said. Inability of such should be an indicator of the need to repeat the verbal input. The implication on understanding between the researcher and the participant brings the readers to examining several necessary parts of the research interview, as in Mental Status Examination.
The Mental Status Examination is a classical example of personality assessment that employs expressive scheme. It is an integral part of a structured psychological/psychiatric interview and serves as a tool to objectively evaluate major aspects of the client’s moment-to-moment mental functioning. It is employed for its ability to be able quickly identify any symptoms that are associated with apparent or dormant mental pathology.
The Mental Status Examination describes an overall mental functioning of the client thus, with the conjunction of other evaluative processes, can serve as a very useful initial diagnostic evaluation of the counseling and/or therapeutic sessions. Maruish (2000) affirmed that this process can be and usually is standardized providing some degree of objectivity. If this process is a standardized version, it can be used for a specific purpose (i. e. identifying the objectivity of the participant in providing the sensitive answers/information).
It can also be more general and directed to a wider audience, as in information-gathering research. The ability of the researcher to pick which areas to emphasize can be considered as an advantage to such processes. However, due to the strictly subjective manner to which the researcher adheres in his/her questioning methodology such technique can be viewed as inefficient. For this process to be useful to the researcher, he or she must record the observations as precisely as possible.