The Social Work Interview

PART ONE

GENERAL ORIENTATION AND BASIC CONCEPTS OF INTERVIEWING AND COMMUNICATION

1

DEFINING AND CHARACTERIZING THE SOCIAL WORK INTERVIEW

ALTHOUGH SOCIAL WORK involves a great deal more than interviewing, social workers spend more time conducting interviews than any other single activity. It is the most important and most frequently used social work skill. This is most clearly true for the direct service worker, but the group worker and community organizer also frequently participate in interviewing.

The human services literature describes an interview as the most pervasive basic social work skill, a fundamental social work activity, and a primary social work tool-in-trade. The interview is the context through which social workers offer and implement most human services. The interview is the primary instrument they use to obtain an understanding of clients and their situation and for helping clients deal with their problems.

Baldock and Prior (1981, 19–20) note that the client interview, which lies at the heart of the social work process, is an event which is not merely the context of, but the basic resource for, social work practice. Interviewing skills are the central skills on which all components of the social work process depend. The purpose of this chapter is to define the interview and make a distinction between it and another activity with which it is frequently confused: the conversation. Furthermore, the chapter distinguishes between social work interviews and other kinds of interviews and explicates the process of the interview.

THE INTERVIEW PROCESS

The primary purpose of the interview is to attempt to help the interviewee by implementation of a problem-solving process in the context of a positive relationship. This characterizes the general parameters of all social work interviews. Every social work interview follows, in some measure, the traditional problem-solving process: a series of sequential steps designed to achieve some objective:

1. Introduction/beginning

2. Social study/data gathering

3. Assessment

4. Intervention/treatment

5. Termination

The body of the process lies in the second, third, and fourth steps. The interviewer attempts, in concert with the interviewee, to develop some mutually acceptable remedial intervention (4) based on a joint understanding of the situation (3) derived from the facts (2).

The logic inherent in the process is indicated in that we cannot effectively do something to make positive changes in a situation (intervention/treatment) unless we understand the situation (assessment), which requires some knowledge about the nature of the problem (social study/data gathering).

The social work interviewer utilizes some applicable technique in moving through the steps of the process. Using his knowledge and skills, the interviewer reflects, clarifies, supports, advises, informs, interprets, questions, confronts, self-discloses, and activates some social policy resources and programs for which the interviewee is eligible.

While all direct service interviews are essentially similar in terms of the process implemented, and similar by the techniques employed, there is some diversity in how the interviews are conducted. One dimension of difference may be in terms of a focus on one component of the problem-solving process—for example, some interviews concentrate on the study component of the interview process. A psychiatric social worker might be asked to do a social study of a client for a staff presentation to determine the next steps in planning. A court may ask a social worker to do a social study of a juvenile in helping to determine a sentencing decision. Here the focus of the interview is directed toward a social study.

An interview may have a primarily assessment objective (Hersen and Turner 2003). A social worker might interview foster care or adoptive applicants to determine whether the agency should place a child with them. A mental health social worker might interview a client to determine whether she can be assigned a DSM classification for managed care purposes.

An interview may be primarily therapeutic in intent to help the client achieve changes in behavior and attitudes toward more effective social functioning. The school-based social worker interviews children to help them adjust to the classroom setting. The medical social worker interviews a convalescent mother to improve her attitude toward the home health aide assigned to help the family. The gerontological social worker interviews aged clients to intensify their motivation to use senior citizen facilities in the community. The family agency social worker may help a mother change her abusive behavior.

All direct service social work interviews tend to have some common, distinctive characteristics. The social work interview is usually diffuse because of the imprecision of the technical procedures for helping. The more precise a profession’s technology, and the more definite its solutions, the more likely it is to circumscribe its area for exploration and intervention. If we could specify what we needed to know to do precise things for and with the client in effecting change, our interview would be less diffuse.

Furthermore, social work interviews tend to be diffuse because clients’ problems are often ambiguous and have multiple determinants. As a result, social work interviewers have a difficult assignment. They generally cannot determine in advance much of what they have to do in the interview; they must respond to the situation as it develops. Interviewers must have considerable discretion to do almost anything they think might be advisable, under highly individualized circumstances, to achieve the purpose of the interview. As a consequence, the social work interview tends to be relatively unstructured. Evidence-based practice, however, encourages interviews that are more structured. The codification of practice in protocols and manuals derived from the research directs the practitioner to apply certain procedures in some ordered manner (Rubin and Parrish 2007).

Management by objective, which requires certain, specific information and explicit outcomes, further shapes in advance the conduct of the interview. The social work interview is more unidirectional than interviews generally. Many interviews are designed to achieve the needs and purposes of both the interviewer and the interviewee: a reporter is trying to get the story, a detective is trying to solve the crime, a lawyer is trying to win the case, and a salesperson is trying to make a sale and possibly get a commission. In contrast, the social work interview is designed, directed, and focused toward unidirectionally meeting the needs and objectives of only the client.

Interview diversity is a consequence of the theoretical approach to helping in which the interviewer has conviction. Such approaches come in many varieties (Roberts and Greene 2002), and each requires some interview adaptations and modifications. Cognitive-behavioral interviews have different goals from rational-emotional interviews, which in turn are different from ego-oriented, psychodynamic, motivational, and task-centered interviews. Each theoretically based procedure for helping requires a different balance and emphasis in the configuration of the techniques used.

The interview setting may determine the modification and adaption of the general social work interview approach. An interview in a hospital is different from an interview in a school or correctional facility. Demographic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, and class also determine differences in approach.

DEFINING THE INTERVIEW AND DISTINGUISHING AN INTERVIEW FROM A CONVERSATION

The simplest definition of an interview is a person-to-person interaction that has a definite and deliberate purpose that is recognized and accepted by both participants. An interview resembles a conversation in many significant ways. Both involve verbal and nonverbal communication between people, during which they exchange ideas, attitudes, and feelings. Both are usually face-to-face interactions.

We have been conversing with people all our lives in a manner that resembles an interview. It is a frequent, common, everyday experience in which we have achieved some competence. Consequently, most of us assume that we know how to conduct an interview. Thus, we bring to the interview habits of interpersonal conversational interaction that have become routine. Most people, as frequent conversationalists, have learned and employ some social and linguistic rules as to how to behave in such encounters (Singleton and Straits 2001, 75).

However, because an interview is a special kind of communication event and not a conversation, such interactions may be inappropriate and/or inefficient for the interview context. Consequently, it is important to identify the differences between a conversation and an interview. The biggest difference is that an interview has a conscious goal, direction, or purpose. Conversational talk meanders without direction, without an agenda; we converse on a wide range of topics. Talk that is defined as an interview, however, has a specific agenda, a specific reason that brings people together to talk. From this critical characteristic of an interview, which differentiates it from a conversation, flow a series of consequences for the way participants relate to one another and the way interaction is structured.

CONTRASTING THE INTERVIEW AND THE CONVERSATION

PURPOSE Because it has a definite purpose, the interview focuses on the content that facilitates its achievement. The interviewer excludes any content, however interesting, that will not contribute to the purpose of the interview. The interview is structured in terms of content and direction. On the other hand, a conversation is open to the promiscuous inclusion of any content, however random and diffuse. The orientation of the conversation is associational; it has no central theme. The interview, in contrast, has unity, progression, thematic consistency, and continuity. Unlike a conversation, the interview is a bounded setting. The participants in an interview limit what commands their attention, what they notice, and what they include in their interaction. A conversation, on the other hand, covers everything but concentrates on nothing.

ROLES If interview content is necessarily selective in order to achieve its purpose, someone has to control content boundaries and direction. One person must take responsibility for directing the interaction so it moves toward the goal. In response to this necessity, the social structure of the interview as a communication event necessitates the allocation of roles. One person is designated as the interviewer and is charged with the responsibility for the process, and someone else is designated as the interviewee. The role relationships are structured. A conversation has no comparable terms that allocate different roles to each participant. Participants in a conversation have mutual responsibility for its content and direction.

Beck and Perry (2008, 7) define interview structure as a function of the degree to which an interviewer controls, directs, and shapes the verbal interchange between the two protagonists. This involves regulating the length, focus, and depth of the interviewee’s discourse, as well as imposing limits and direction through the interviewer’s questions and interventions. The degree of structuring needs to be applied with flexibility and sensitivity to the rights and needs of the interviewee, and the nature of the problem or concern.

TASKS The role of interviewer has clearly defined tasks. He or she is allocated primary, if not exclusive, responsibility for accomplishing the purpose of the interview. Consequently, conducting an interview requires some technical knowledge of interviewing procedures: how to start it, how to keep it on course, when and how to end it, how to facilitate productive interaction, how to recognize the difference between relevant and irrelevant content, and so on. The experienced interviewer, supposedly, has such knowledge and skills that justify his assignment to the role and to the responsibility for implementing associated tasks.

It needs to be noted that the role of the interviewee also involves responsibility for performing some tasks, the implementation of which is necessary to achieve the objectives of the interview. These involve openly and fully sharing the information that the interviewer needs to know if she is to be helpful and cooperating with the interviewer for joint formulation of the objectives of the interview.

DIFFERENTIAL STATUS Because the interviewer supposedly has the necessary interviewing knowledge and skills, validated by his professional education and ratified by his position in the agency and/or licensing, the interviewer has superior status in the interview. Unlike an interview, a conversation has no recognition of differential statuses and roles among the participants.

It is desirable, for both pragmatic and ideological reasons, to reduce the interviewee-interviewer difference in status and regard both participants as copartners in mutually endeavoring to achieve the purpose of the interview. However, despite our best efforts to minimize the difference in status, one level of difference, which is inherent in the nature of the interview, cannot be eliminated: the interviewer is primus inter pares—first among equals.

Although the behavior of all parties to a conversation may be spontaneous and unplanned, the actions of the interviewer must be planned, deliberate, and consciously selected to further the purpose of the interview; this is simply part of the prescribed role behavior. Unlike a conversation, an interview is a program of planned and organized communication. This pattern is predetermined by the positions people occupy in the interview—by the formal structure of reciprocal roles and expectations.

Because the interviewers are responsible for directing the interview so it achieves its purpose, they have to deliberately select the interventions they need to make. Further, unlike participants in a conversation, interviewers have to be cognizant of any feelings and attitudes they have toward the interviewee that may impede or distort the achievement of purpose. Because interviewers are responsible for consciously guiding the interview to achieve its purpose, they are obligated to plan the interview to whatever extent possible. People do not consciously prepare for engaging in a conversation.

USE OF TIME Another structural difference between a conversation and an interview relates to scheduling. Unlike a conversation, the interview is structured in terms of time and context. A conversation can start at any time and in any place, without preliminaries, but an interview is generally scheduled to begin at a particular time at a particular location. Also, a conversation has no specified duration, but an interview is scheduled to conclude at a predetermined time.

While conversational participants can terminate the conversation whenever they want, social work interviewers are professionally obligated to continue for the scheduled time period, or earlier if the interview objective has been achieved.

ACCOUNTABILITY Another difference between an interview and a conversation relates to the interviewer’s obligation regarding accountability. The interviewer has to remember and record what went on during the interview in order to make subsequent use of the material in helping the interviewee. Participants in a conversation do not have such obligations.

These formal structural aspects of the social system of the interview—designated roles, differential assignment of tasks, difference in status, administrative factors associated with scheduling, and accountability—distinguish the interview as a communicative event.

NORMS Additional differences between a conversation and an interview relate to customary norms associated with the two different interpersonal communicative events. Briggs (1989, 26) notes that we have learned social and linguistic rules governing everyday conversation that may be inappropriate or inapplicable in an interview: The interview is a unique speech event that is patterned by an array of communicative features, many of which are not shared by ordinary conversation. For instance, some norms regarding communicative reciprocity are different in a conversation in contrast to an interview.

FOCUS In a conversation, participants share equal talk time. The ratio of talk in an interview is skewed in favor of the interviewee. The interviewee should be talking more than the interviewer. Interviewers might refrain from taking their turn when the conversational ritual calls for this, because the emphasis is on permitting the interviewee the greater opportunity to speak.

The asymmetrical nature of time allotment derives from the fact that the social work interview is unidirectional in focus, designed to serve the needs of the interviewee. Consequently, the interviewee’s story and concerns have clear priority for explication, recognition, and exploration.

HETEROGENEITY OF PARTICIPANTS We choose our conversational partners, but we are assigned interviewees. Communications defined as conversations are an end in themselves. People engage in them because the interaction provides satisfaction. For this reason we usually choose to converse with those with whom we have a great deal in common. Homophily, or likeness, between conversational participants increases the probability of obtaining satisfaction. Interview participants usually differ in terms of background, experience, and lifestyle. A young, White, upper-middle-income, college-educated woman may never have the occasion to converse with an older, lower-income, high school dropout Asian man. However, such disparate people participate in interviews daily. Heterogeneity of participants is a much more likely condition in an interview. Homophily is not a characteristic of interview participants.

Conversations are generally conducted by people who share a common ground. They usually have common interests. Interviews, however, are conducted between people who do not have the initial assurance of common ground. Some verbal sparring is necessary before it is comfortably established that they are on the same page.

RECIPROCITY BETWEEN PARTICIPANTS In a conversation between two people, the participants are permitted to ask each other questions of varying levels of intimacy. In an interview, however, the interviewer is permitted to ask the interviewee questions regarding income, sexual activity, or parent-child problems. In contrast, the interviewee cannot ask the interviewer the same types of questions. The interviewer’s professional self is open to revelation, but the personal self is primarily, although not exclusively, off-limits.

In accordance with conversational norms, participants in a conversation expect their partner to act with tact—to refrain from introducing content that may be embarrassing, anxiety provoking, controversial, or unduly intimate. However, an interview may require this kind of deliberate intrusion. For example, a family service worker says:

Because it seemed necessary, with considerable hesitancy, I stimulated a discussion about her drug-addicted son. The reaction was stronger than I had anticipated. She started to cry uncontrollably. The reaction made me anxious, but I felt she needed to get it off her chest.

This nonreciprocal aspect of the interaction follows from the main objective of the social work interview, which is to help the interviewee. To be helpful, the interviewer needs access to the details, thoughts, and feelings of the interviewee’s life, which only she can provide. We seek disclosure of personal information for professional purposes. As a consequence, the interviewee needs the protection of guarantees of confidentiality and anonymity—safeguards that ordinarily are unnecessary in a conversation.

INTERRUPTIONS Conversational norms regarding communicative civility do not encourage interrupting your partner. Peremptory interruptions by the interviewer, however, may be required and permitted in the interview for the sake of efficiency. A school social worker says of a student who took over the interview and talked nonstop:

I was anxious about the time, but I did not know how to politely break into her talking. Is there any polite way of doing this? Perhaps one has to learn to be impolite if the task of the interview demands it.

SILENCE AND PAUSES There are conversational norms regarding silence and pauses. Prolonged conversational pauses are perceived as uncomfortable and embarrassing. An interviewer, however, might decide that a deliberate long pause is necessary to encourage the interviewee to continue to talk or to recover after some very emotional interaction.

DEGREE OF FORMALITY A conversation is a social occasion characterized by informality. The interview is generally a professional event characterized by a degree of formality. We dress for an interview, but normally do not for a conversation. Greater formality of speech distinguishes a conversation from an interview. Hesitations, fractured sentences, circumlocutions, ambiguities, and repetitions are characteristic of ordinary conversational speech. Interviewing speech seeks to be more formal, precise, structured, explicit, and organized—at least on the part of the interviewer.

One interviewer says she knows she is interviewing when she greets an interviewee with How are you? In conversation she is more likely to say, How ya doing? Informal sociability is the principal descriptive attribute of a conversation; professional formality is the principal defining characteristic of the interview.

Having defined the distinctive characteristics that establish the interview as a special communicative event compared with a conversation, we are in a position to be consciously aware of the need to modify our ubiquitous conversational habits to meet the requirements of our role as an interviewer.

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BOX 1.1

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CONVERSATION AND A HELPING INTERVIEW

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The characteristics that distinguish an interview from a conversation are common to all interviews. And a wide variety of people—social workers, journalists, public opinion pollsters, doctors, lawyers, clergy, and so on—conduct interviews for a wide variety of purposes. What, then, distinguishes the social work interview from other types of interviews?

DEFINING THE SOCIAL WORK INTERVIEW

Social work interviews are concerned with social work content, are scheduled to achieve social work purposes, and take place primarily in social work settings. This statement in itself shows how hard it is to make such distinctions. If society designated social work as a profession having clear and exclusive concern with certain areas of activity, then the statement would have unambiguous meaning.

There are overlapping and blurred boundaries between social work and other human service professions: psychiatry, psychology, counseling, ministry, and others. However, social work does have an area of primary, principal concern that is distinctive—namely, its concern with people in their enactment of social roles and in their relation to social institutions. The United Nations Secretariat defines social work as an activity designed to help toward a better, mutual adjustment of the individual and his social environment (Friedlander 1961, 25). The Model Statute Social Workers’ Licensing Act (National Association of Social Workers [NASW] 1967) defines social work as "the professional activity of helping individuals, groups, or communities enhance or restore their capacity for social functioning and creating societal conditions favorable to this goal" (emphasis added).

The September 1977 and January 1981 issues of Social Work, the principal journal of the NASW, reported the proceedings of two national conferences explicitly concerned with defining the nature of social work. Although the presentations differed in certain details, both emphasized the distinctive and differentiating concern of social work with social functioning, social problems, social needs, social roles, social policy, social institutions, and social well-being.

Noting that social work is a diverse profession with fluid boundaries, Gibelman (2004, 8–9) reviews various definitions of the profession that have been proposed. In almost every attempt, the focus of concern is on social need, social functioning, social context, and social reform.

If a young mother of four children is injured in an automobile accident and taken to the hospital, she will likely be interviewed by a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker. All three may use the same general principles and procedures to ensure an effective interview. In each instance the interview would have a purpose, but the purpose would be different. Consequently, the content of the medical interview might be to uncover significant details of the woman’s physical functioning so as to plan appropriate treatment. The lawyer’s purpose might be to find out more about the nature of the accident in preparation for a lawsuit. The social worker’s purpose would be to find out about the disruptive effects of the injury on the woman’s significant social roles: wife, mother, and employee. The purpose might be to determine how to ensure adequate care for the dependent children, the effects of the injury on the marital relationship, the effects of her loss of income on the family, and the effects of her injury on her relationships with friends.

When discussing the activities that characterize social work practice, prominent, general social work texts usually refer to social roles, social functioning and social enhancement, social justice, and social needs (Barker 2003; Compton, Galaway, and Cournoyer 2005; Hepworth et al. 2007; Kirst-Ashman and Hull 2012; see also Sheafor and Horejsi 2012).

Throughout life we frequently encounter the need to adjust to the requirements and problems associated with changes in social roles. A man gets married and becomes a husband, a woman gives birth and becomes a mother, a person gets a job and becomes an employee, a child enrolls in school and becomes a student, and an individual has surgery and becomes a hospital patient. Husband, mother, employee, student, and patient are all social roles that require new behaviors and pose new problems. Anxiety in assuming the role, difficulties in learning the behaviors required by the role, and problems in implementing role responsibilities are among the primary concerns of the social work interview.

The social worker in the mental health center or the psychiatric hospital is concerned with the social antecedents, social concomitants, and social consequences of mental disabilities. The social worker in the health care setting is concerned with the social antecedents, concomitants, and consequences of physical illness. Family and child welfare agencies are concerned with the social aspects of marital disruption and parent-child relationships. The social worker in the correctional setting is concerned with the social aspects of a disordered relationship to the legal institutions of society. Income maintenance agencies are concerned with the social aspects of a disordered relationship to the economic institutions of society. Thus, social roles, social functioning, and social problems define the distinctive, relevant content of a social work interview.

Other professional groups, notably sociologists, are also interested in the phenomenon of social functioning. However, social work is different from sociology because it is a technology. As a technology, social work is concerned with, and responsible for, helping to achieve controlled changes in natural relationships via relatively standardized procedures which are scientifically based (Greenwood 1957, 24). As a social scientist, the sociologist seeks primarily to understand the world of the client. As a technologist, the social worker seeks to change it.

In distinguishing between the social scientist and the social worker, Rothman (1980, 15) notes, "The fundamental difference—is one of function. The social scientist has the primary function of comprehending the world: producing knowledge that permits him and others to understand it better. The practitioner has the key function of changing the world or, more specifically, parts thereof." For the sociologist, social problems are subject matters to be studied and explained; for the social worker, social problems call for functions to be performed and situations that require change. If the interviewee’s social situation is the content of the social work interview, the purpose of the interviewer is to help the interviewee effect change in his social situation.

Every human service profession recognizes that human service problems almost invariably are the consequence of a complex concatenation of bio-psycho-social elements. The recognition that this is the case is not unique to social work. Medicine, for instance, abandoned the Medical Model with its principal concern for the patient’s physical condition to accept a more patient-centered bio-psycho-social orientation (Engel 1977; Frankel, Quill, and McDaniel 2003; Mead and Bower 2000; Smith 2002).

However, while all human service professions acknowledge the need to recognize the patient/client as a bio-psycho-social entity, they may each emphasize different aspects of the configuration: the doctor sees a BIO-psycho-social problem, the psychologist sees a bio-PSYCHO-social problem, and the social worker sees a bio-psycho-SOCIAL problem.

The public assigns responsibility for different areas of this comprehensive configuration to different professions, so while each of the professions is aware of the importance of the total bio-psycho-social configuration, it focuses its attention and concern on the areas to which it has been primarily assigned and about which it has some knowledge and expertise. Thus, medicine focuses on physical health, psychology on mental/psychological health, and social work on social health.

At whatever level in the process the social worker intervenes—whether at the community level in trying to effect change in the social environment or at the direct service level in trying to effect change in the individual, family, or group situation—the concern is, again, primarily with social phenomena. The function and focus of the profession thus determine in a general way the distinctive content of social work interviews.

A national study on what social workers actually do found that an overwhelming majority of respondents cited clinical direct service as their primary function (Gibelman and Schervish 1997, 112; see also Gibelman 2004, 15). Consequently, the interview, which is the sole focus of this text, is the interview engaged in by a social worker in performance of direct service with an individual client who needs help with a social problem.

ALTERNATIVES TO AND MODIFICATIONS OF THE INTERVIEW

The interview is the principal technique through which social workers achieve their purposes, but it is not the only way to achieve them. Social workers also obtain information about the client from documents, records of previous agency contacts, and medical examinations and psychological tests. Also, social workers help clients by seeking to modify the environment on their behalf and by providing concrete services—money, home health aides, a foster home, day care, and the like—in addition to whatever help they can offer through personal contact during the interview. Such procedures supplement rather than substitute for the interview, which remains the principal instrument for human service helping.

It must be noted, however, that the interview has its limitations. It is a subjective report by the client of his situation. The objective reality, available to the fly on the wall of the actual event, may present a different picture. But the client’s story is her experience and the reality to which she is reacting. The interviewer has no option but to accept the story as it is presented and deal with it.

The face-to-face interview, despite its shortcomings, is the most flexible and responsive way to obtain people’s life stories, thought processes, attitudes, and emotional states. We can obtain information not only about people’s experiences but about their interpretation of and responses to such experiences as well. Through words, which are vicarious actions, the worker can experience with the client various situations in the past, present, and future. The interview is bound by neither time nor space. In an interview, workers can adapt their approach to any lead offered by the interviewee, thus individualizing the interaction. Despite its definite shortcomings and deficiencies, the advantages, versatility, and flexibility of interviewing have made the clinical interview the procedure of choice for social work interaction with the client.

Social workers spend more time interviewing than in any other single activity. Interviewing skills are the primary skills on which all other aspects of social work depend. We can define the interview as a conversation with a deliberate purpose that is accepted by the participants. However, several characteristics distinguish an interview from a conversation. Whereas conversations contain diffuse content, interviews focus on specific content. Conversations involve no structured role relationships, whereas a differential allocation of roles and tasks is characteristic of the interview. Conversations are reciprocal, whereas interviews are not; interviews focus on meeting the needs of the interviewee. Conversations are spontaneous and unplanned; interviews are planned to achieve some purpose. Conversations occur naturally, but interviews are formally arranged. Although no one is obligated to initiate or continue a conversation, the interviewer is obligated to accept a request for an interview and continue the interaction until the interview is concluded. Conversations are based on tact and etiquette, but interviews are regulated by professional norms that sanction the uncovering of unpleasant facts and feelings. Compared to conversational speech, the interviewer’s speech is formal and structured. Conversations require only casual attention, but an interview requires concentrated, specific attention to the interaction. Participants are not accountable for what occurs during a conversation, whereas the interviewer has an obligation regarding accountability. Interviews, but not conversations, frequently occur between people who differ in regard to background, experience, and lifestyle.

The social work interview differs from other types of interviews in that it is concerned with problems in social functioning. The social work interview is more likely than other kinds of interviews to be discursive, diffuse—not standardized—and focused on affective content. Because social work interviewers cannot determine much of their strategy in advance, responding to the situation as it unfolds, they must have considerable professional skill in deciding when and how to introduce certain content and determine the interpersonal context in which to explore it.

The general purpose of most social work interviews is informational (to complete a social study), evaluative (to arrive at an assessment), and therapeutic (to effect change). However, each type of interview covers the steps in the social work problem-solving process: data gathering, assessment, and intervention. Each interview in a sequence is designed to achieve some specific purpose that combined will fulfill the goal of the contact. Each and every interview mirrors and replicates in microcosm the helping process, from data gathering to intervention. Consequently, studying the social work interview in general helps us understand the individual interview in particular.

The clinical interview—the type of social work interview most frequently used—has limitations. The data obtained in clinical interviews represent a retrospective and subjective interpretation of reality. Some discrepancy is likely to exist between the interviewee’s verbal account of events and the actual event. However, the clinical interview remains the most flexible and responsive way to learn about people and their feelings.

2

THE INTERVIEW AS COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATION IS the sharing of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and ideas through the exchange of verbal and nonverbal symbols. We share our private thoughts and feelings with others through communication. The word derives from communicare, the Latin verb that means to make common.

DEFINING COMMUNICATION AND ITS ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS

An interview is a special form of communication. Although the social work interview is a particular type of communication situation, its characteristics include many aspects of the general process of communication. Consequently, understanding the general process of communication contributes to a better understanding of the social work interview. That is why we are introducing this material before we discuss the specifics of the social work interview.

The interview involves two people, each of whom possesses a receiving system, a processing system, and a transmitting system. The receiving system consists of the five senses, the receptors. Communication primarily involves two receptors: the eyes and the ears. Having received the incoming signal, we process it; this involves making sense of the message received. The processing consists of recalling stored information, relating other information that is relevant to the message, thinking about the message, evaluating the message, and translating it so that the message is coherent within the receiver’s frame of reference. As receivers we select certain items from the incoming message, ignore others, and rearrange what we hear into interpretable patterns. We then formulate a message in response. Effector organs—the voice, mouth, hands, eyes, and so on—transmit selected words and nonverbal gestures so that the other party in the interview can receive them; the second party in turn processes the message in order to formulate a response.

Communication once initiated is a circular reciprocally interacting process. The receiver-decoder of the message becomes the encoder of the next message. Each unit is a consequence of the unit that preceded it and an antecedent of the unit that follows. Participants in the communicative act are both senders and receivers.

A message is not a message until it is received and decoded. A communication loop is not complete until the person to whom the message is addressed begins to respond. As someone once said, I never know what I said until I hear the response to it.

While receiving, processing, and responding to messages that originate externally, the interview participant is also receiving, processing, and responding to messages that originate internally. We are constantly engaged in checking how we feel physically and emotionally. The brain acts as a communication center, processing all the messages, interpreting them, and formulating an appropriate response.

Encoding and decoding are possible only if interviewer and interviewee are speaking the same language. They are using, in effect, a shared common code, a particular society’s consensual sign system. But as Alfred North Whitehead, the English philosopher, once said, Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks. The mind has to translate the squeaks so that they make sense. If the recipient is to receive the message with the meaning that the sender intended when encoding it, sender and receiver have to define the words they use in the same way. The signals are meaningless sounds until we decipher the sounds by attributing meanings to them. The meanings, not in the words themselves, are in the mind.

Perception and comprehension of the message are not solely the result of actual signals transmitted, seen, and heard but are constructed from the signals and sifted through prior experience, knowledge, biases, and attitudes. Good communication exists when one person encodes the thought and transmits it freely and with fidelity so the message decoded by the hearer is a faithful reproduction of the original message and also when the meanings of the symbols transmitted and received correspond exactly. When this happens, we come closest to approximating the derivation of the word communication—namely, to make common. As Nunnally and Moy (1989) note, good communication is the achievement of shared meaning.

The serial nature of communication makes it a hazardous undertaking. Each cycle of interaction—encoding, sending, receiving, processing, decoding—follows from the previous cycle, so that difficulty encountered in any one cycle adversely affects communication in the subsequent cycles. And although it is interactional, going from interviewer to interviewee to interviewer, and so on, it is also dynamic; it builds. If we could photograph it, the interaction would look like a spiral or helix rather than a circle.

Communication is also irreversible. What we have said cannot be unsaid. Unlike the written word, which can be erased or edited, the spoken word is irretrievable. If your foot slips, you can regain your balance; if your tongue slips, you cannot recall your words.

Messages achieve part of their meaning from the context in which we send them. The same question in different settings evokes different aspects of the client’s situation. The question How are things going? in a public assistance setting relates to budget and finances. In a child guidance clinic, it would relate to the child referred for service, and in a marital counseling agency, it would refer to the marriage.

Every communication encapsulates a content message and a relationship message. It says something about how the participants feel about each other and the difference in their status and power. Every communication evokes feelings as well as cognition. A communication, then, involves an exchange of feelings as well as ideas.

To recapitulate, communication is an interactional cycle of coding, sending, receiving, processing, and decoding verbal and nonverbal symbols that have no intrinsic meaning. We achieve maximum communication when the message we send is decoded exactly as we encoded it. However, physical, social, and psychological barriers in both encoding and decoding make fidelity in communication difficult. Communication is dynamic, transactional, irreversible, contextual, and multidimensional.

METACOMMUNICATION

Metacommunication further complicates the process of communication. Metacommunications are messages instructing us how to interpret the communication: I only said that to get your goat; Don’t take it seriously; It’s between us; and I’m only kidding. Metacommunication provides the frame of reference within which to interpret the content of messages.

Nonverbal images, smiles, and hand gestures that accompany the words are metacommunications that modify, cancel, mitigate, or reinforce the meanings given to the words (see chapter 4). Vocalizations—pauses, inflections, amplitude, tone accompanying the words—also are significant components of the message that shape its meaning. These accompaniments instruct us how the words are meant to be interpreted.

Depending on the metacommunication—the message explaining the message—the same words can be a question, a paraphrase, an order, a request, or a neutral descriptive statement. So you went with them to have a drink can be a paraphrase if said in one way or a reprimand if said in another. Effective communication requires that we attend not just to what the words mean but what the speaker means and the context of the communication.

SEQUENTIAL STEPS IN THE PROCESS OF COMMUNICATION

Let us follow the communication process, noting the more frequent problems encountered at significant points.

ENCODING BY THE INTERVIEWER

The process starts with the interviewer, who is responsible for initiating and guiding the interview. Interviewers have the problem of selecting what to say from among a number of things they might say and then deciding how to say it. Determining what to say requires that the interviewer answer such questions as What am I trying to achieve at this point in the interview? and What can I say that would best further this objective and maintain or enhance the positive relationship? How to say something requires answers to such questions as How can I say what needs to be said verbally and nonverbally so that, given the interviewee’s culture, vocabulary, and competence, this person is likely to clearly understand?; How can I say it to ensure that I maintain a positive relationship with the client?; and How can I say it so that it’s appropriate to the context and ties in with the last message from the client?

At this point in the process interviewers need to be aware of their feelings toward the client that might lead to a message that is rejecting, seducing, or confrontational. Feelings about the subject matter being discussed (incest, illness, poverty, childlessness, and the like) are additional determinants of what the interviewer chooses to say and how to encode it.

In this internal dialogue sorting out the alternatives in content and feeling about the message being considered is the necessary precursor to the next step: actually encoding the message. The interviewer needs to translate the thought into the verbal and visual symbols that will carry the message.

Communication involves converting private thoughts into public utterances. In encoding the message interviewers must have a sufficiently elaborate vocabulary to select the precise symbols and nuances to communicate their intended meaning. Workers need a vocabulary that is rich enough to convey the meaning of their thoughts and varied enough to adapt to the vocabulary of different clients.

The next step involves externalizing the inner dialogue by actually articulating the words that will carry the message. Events and experiences cannot be communicated as such. They have to be translated into words that carry a symbolic representation of the experience. The message as transmitted is the thought or idea encoded in the overt behavior of words and gestures. (Multiple channels are available for communication, but