Transana Video Analysis Software as a Tool for Teaching Initial Unstructured Clinical Assessment Interviewing Skills to School Psychology Students

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate an alternative approach to facilitate teaching initial unstructured clinical assessment interviewing skills through use of a qualitative video analysis software program called Transana. This paper draws on the author’s experience using Transana to teach interviewing skills to students in a graduate training program in school psychology. The key advantage of Transana is the program’s capacity to facilitate synchronization of video and audio footage with corresponding verbal and nonverbal transcripts that can be coded, saved, retrieved, and displayed by any combination of codes and/or file identifiers. It is the author’s wish that this paper will serve to stimulate further use and exploration of Transana as a tool for teaching initial unstructured clinical assessment interviewing and other clinical skills by school psychology programs and programs in similar disciplines.