Today's Session On Interviewing Skills

Interviewing Skills
Today’s session on interviewing skills covers foundation skills such as questioning, paraphrasing, probing deeper, the use of self-disclosure and closing the interview. Interviewing plays a very important role within social work because social workers spend more time carrying out interviews. One area that was covered extensively was the use of self-disclosure. The use of self-disclosure can help the interviewer to feel more empathic and in tune with the interviewee. However, this should be a skill that should not be used often as over-sharing can be negative. A member of the group gave an example of how a colleague had disclosed to a service user with schizophrenia that he had the similar illness. The service user viewed

Communication involves not only talking but also observation. An issue that was discussed extensively in today’s session is the importance of acknowledging our ignorance of other people when we engage in communication with them. We are prejudged and the moment we meet other people, we start to apply our preconceived thoughts to them. But social workers are to listen to people they work with in order to understand them better. Social workers must be careful not to draw a conclusion about people as they could be wrong. There is a huge amount of contact in social work is with other professionals and other people who play important roles in the lives of service users. Therefore, communication skills are very important. It enables social workers to learn to understand the meaning of the message being transferred and to decode and relate back what is

It covered various accountabilities that are expected of social workers. Social workers are accountable to many groups; the government, society, employers, colleagues, service users, etc. Accountability is very complex area and we spent some time trying to unpack the complexities. A question was posed; “who are social workers accountable to from the list above? Are they accountable to service users the most than others on the list? We were asked to answer the question by using our case study from the formative essay. In a conflict situation as seen in the case study, social workers have to revert back to the professional or organisational codes of ethics or policies. That way they would have been seen to have applied equity in terms of carrying out their professional duty. Building a friendship with service user does not mean social workers should negate their duty. I learnt that the skill of separating professional relationship and friendship is important in social work