In this approach, an effort is made to tailor aspects of the therapist assigned to juvenile delinquents, the therapeutic relationship, and the treatment itself to an optimal match with receptivity characteristics of the delinquent clients involved. It has been proposed that productive psychotherapy with such clients must begin with the offering of an impersonal therapist-client relationship, one less threatening and more attractive to youngsters typically mistrustful of adults and reluctant to explore their own emotional functioning. This study examined this proposition in a factorial design crossing three levels of interviewer-offered empathy and genuineness with four types of delinquent adolescents grouped in terms of Warren's Interpersonal Maturity Level Category system. Four of the criteria typically used in research on the quality of initial psychotherapeutic relationships are: (1) subject liking for or attraction to the interviewer, (2) subject self-disclosure to the interviewer, (3) subject-stated willingness to attend a second interview, and (4) actual subject attendance or nonattendance at a second scheduled interview. With a few exceptions, study results indicated that across quality-of-relationship criteria, youngsters in the I-level categories reflective of mistrust, nonpsychological mindedness, and reluctance to explore feelings significantly more responsive to Low empathy-High genuineness interviewers than to interviewers communicating either High empathy-High genuineness or High empathy-Low genuineness. These results stand in support of a prescriptive view of psychotherapy, in general, and of the particular interviewer communication condition of the low empathy and high genuineness combination as an apparently utilitarian prescription for juvenile delinquents in particular. 2 tables and 62 references. (Author abstract modified)