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Motivational interviewing has become widely adopted as a counseling style for promoting behavior change; however, as yet it lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding its processes and efficacy. This article proposes that self-determination theory (SDT) can offer such a framework. The principles of motivational interviewing and SDT are outlined and the parallels between them are drawn out. We show how both motivational interviewing and SDT are based on the assumption that humans have an innate tendency for personal growth toward psychological integration, and that motivational interviewing provides the social-environmental facilitating factors suggested by SDT to promote this tendency. We propose that adopting an SDT perspective could help in furthering our understanding of the psychological processes involved in motivational interviewing.
Motivational interviewing has become widely adopted as a counseling style for facilitating behavior change. Having evolved originally from clinical experience in the treatment of problem drinking, motivational interviewing was first described by Miller (1983). Its principles and clinical procedures were expanded upon by Miller and Rollnick (1991, 2002). Motivational interviewing and adaptations of motivational interviewing (AMIs) have been extended to a wide range of behavior change contexts, including other drugs of misuse (e.g., van Bilsen, 1991; Saunders, Wilkinson, & Allsop, 1991; Stephens, Roffman, & Curtin, 2000), HIV prevention among drug users (Baker, Kochan, Dixon, Heather, & Wodak, 1994), smoking cessation (e.g., Rollnick, Butler, & Stott, 1997; Butler et al., 1999), sex offending (Garland & Dougher, 1991), and a variety of other health behaviors, particularly in medical settings (e.g., Jensen, 1996; Rollnick, Kinnersley, & Stott, 1993; Rollnick, Mason, & Butler, 1999; Stott, Rollnick, Rees, & Pill, 1995). Systematic reviews of the efficacy of motivational interviewing and AMk (Burke, Arkowitz, & Dunn, 2002; Dunn, DeRoo, & Rivara, 2001; Noonan & Moyers, 1997; Resnicow et al., 2002) have concluded that, despite methodological problems in many of the studies, the literature provides converging evidence for reasonably consistent and robust effects of AMIs across a variety of behavioral domains, particularly those involving alcohol and other drugs.
Miller (1983) described motivational interviewing as being based on the principles of experimental social psychology, drawing on the concepts of causal attributions, cognitive dissonance, and self-efficacy. Motivational interviewing has been also closely aligned with Prochaska and DiClemente's (1983) transtheoretical model of behavior change...