Importance Of Constructive Interviewing Skills

The interviewing skills discussed from the last chapter provides a foundation for basic interviewing skills, however, more advanced skills are needed to set a more tentative interview agenda and these skills include summarization, information giving, confrontation, and interpretation. When assessing my competence on advanced interviewing skills I believe that I can conduct a constructive interview and can explain the importance of a tentative interview agenda. I would say that I can accurately describe the concepts and skills and I can consistently identify the concept or skill when observing and analyzing practice activities. However, it will take time to be an expert interviewer, however, I feel that I can do this but it just might take time to become fully competent since I have not done this actively, however, I do have some experience with past job experiences in my life. A sample agenda when meeting with a client might include the following.

1. “Welcome and some small talk” (Cummins et al., 2012, p.101).

2. “General open-ended questions about the

By definition, this skill can call upon both the social worker and the client to be introspective. Interpretation can point out the casual connection between repeated behaviors, feelings, and thoughts” (Cummins et al., 2012, p.111-113). Helping the client to have insights helps them to want to make changes and focusing on the client’s strengths and potential helps them to have hope for their situation. “As the social worker offers an interpretation, he or she should be alert to the client’s verbal and nonverbal responses because it can stimulate a variety of feelings in the client. If the social worker feels the client needs more support to deal with the new insight, then interpretation should be paired with paraphrase, reflection of feeling, or summarization” (Hepworth et al.,