Interviewing is a highly important skill for a social worker to achieve. Whether the social worker is working with families, hospice, children, crises, in prisons, or various other positions, one will need to be able to conduct an interview in order to successfully communicate with one’s clients. Throughout this course, we have learned various skills to improve our interviewing capabilities and have conducted a final interview to show these skills and witness our abilities as well as some challenges we may have had. For this essay, I will discuss the learning goals I aimed to achieve through my interview. I will then discuss different skills I used throughout the interview, reactions the client had to me, as well as reactions that I had to
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These were my goals because I felt that throughout my practice interviews I had not used them as much, especially building good rapport. Instead of building rapport I would jump into the issue and at times trying to solve it before truly understanding what was going on, which leads to why I also wanted to work on asking better questions that would help my client be able to expand their thoughts. Rapport is part of building an empathic relationship, the first stage of the Five-Stage Model for Structuring the Session (Ivey, Ivey, & Zalaquett, 2014, p. 190). By doing this I would be able to make the client more comfortable and willing to open up to me. I attempted to build a good rapport by using empathic listening and several questions. Empathic listening involves using active listening skills, including empathy, paraphrasing, and summarization. It is visible at 0:17 that I am reacting empathically by sharing her shock and unhappiness through my facial expression and simply stating “oh”. Next I used both open and closed questions to gain more insight from the client. Although I was fortunate enough to have a client who …show more content…
It was nice to hear what fresh opinions had to say, when they had not heard the same interview over and over as I had. I also find it easier to notice strengths and weaknesses when watching someone else’s, opposed to my own. The feedback that I received was that I was very stiff throughout the interview. I believed this was a fair statement, and I believe that next time I will likely sit in a different environment, perhaps without a desk between us so it does not feel so professional, and more comfortable. Another piece of feedback that I was given was that I could have used longer silences. Although I can understand why I was told this, I believe that I gave a reasonable time for silences and because my client talked quite a bit, it was necessary for me to make statements when there were slight pauses. The final piece of feedback that I received was that I needed to focus the conversation better, mainly on Danielle’s goals. I should have said, “now that you have vented, what is the next step”. I completely agree with this feedback and have since thought about different ways that I could have directed the conversation. During the interview I let Danielle vent a lot about the issues she was having, but had I focused on the part where she knew that her friends were “shitty” (1:48) then perhaps the conversation could have taken a better direction and accomplished more. Danielle already knew that her friends were not good for
These were my goals because I felt that throughout my practice interviews I had not used them as much, especially building good rapport. Instead of building rapport I would jump into the issue and at times trying to solve it before truly understanding what was going on, which leads to why I also wanted to work on asking better questions that would help my client be able to expand their thoughts. Rapport is part of building an empathic relationship, the first stage of the Five-Stage Model for Structuring the Session (Ivey, Ivey, & Zalaquett, 2014, p. 190). By doing this I would be able to make the client more comfortable and willing to open up to me. I attempted to build a good rapport by using empathic listening and several questions. Empathic listening involves using active listening skills, including empathy, paraphrasing, and summarization. It is visible at 0:17 that I am reacting empathically by sharing her shock and unhappiness through my facial expression and simply stating “oh”. Next I used both open and closed questions to gain more insight from the client. Although I was fortunate enough to have a client who …show more content…
It was nice to hear what fresh opinions had to say, when they had not heard the same interview over and over as I had. I also find it easier to notice strengths and weaknesses when watching someone else’s, opposed to my own. The feedback that I received was that I was very stiff throughout the interview. I believed this was a fair statement, and I believe that next time I will likely sit in a different environment, perhaps without a desk between us so it does not feel so professional, and more comfortable. Another piece of feedback that I was given was that I could have used longer silences. Although I can understand why I was told this, I believe that I gave a reasonable time for silences and because my client talked quite a bit, it was necessary for me to make statements when there were slight pauses. The final piece of feedback that I received was that I needed to focus the conversation better, mainly on Danielle’s goals. I should have said, “now that you have vented, what is the next step”. I completely agree with this feedback and have since thought about different ways that I could have directed the conversation. During the interview I let Danielle vent a lot about the issues she was having, but had I focused on the part where she knew that her friends were “shitty” (1:48) then perhaps the conversation could have taken a better direction and accomplished more. Danielle already knew that her friends were not good for