Clinical Interviewing as a Social Worker
Part A
The importance of effective clinical interviewing revolves around being able to establish a certain level of trust with the client. Essentially, the goal of the social worker is to get to the heart of the problem and to elucidate truth. It’s very difficult to get people to share honestly if they feel guarded or feel as though they are being judged. A presentation given at Minnesota State University at Moorhead found that the following personality traits are most crucial to clients when it comes to having a social worker: understanding, compassionate, pleasant, and possessing the ability to put others at ease (Bitfocus.com, 2016). Being able to embody these traits means that one is able to convey very aptly how much one is interested in one’s client and that one has kind intentions, as a safe person.
Maintaining confidentiality consistently is another vital pillar of clinical interviewing, as clients need to know that they can trust you with the intimate details of their lives (Bitfocus.com, 2016). Likewise, when engaging in clinical interviewing, it’s important to adequately convey empathy and engage in practices that suspend one’s own judgments and critiques in order to better absorb what the client is saying and to understand their needs. In a similar manner, engaging in active listening is...
Showing that one is listening through eye contact, nodding and asking appropriate follow-up questions is crucial when indicating that one is listening fully and adequately (Cournoyer, 2016). All of these factors are crucial in order to ensure that the client continues to share.
Part B
The details of the case in the video begins with the social worker putting Ms. Smith at ease, and speaking to her in a gentle and pleasant manner. Ms. Smith expresses that she is nervous about the entire endeavor, and the social worker again puts her at ease. One of the major details that arise during the video is that the social worker brings our attention to the fact that Ms. Smith’s daughter is still using a bottle at four years old. Most child developmental experts believe that children should give up the bottle completely at 12 months, and drink from a cup exclusively. Furthermore, we discover that the child has been suffering from tooth decay, as a result of the fact that she has continued to use a bottle for so long. These are of course distressing details. What is even more distressing is that the social worker attempts to create a sliding scale to determine how concerned Ms. Smith is regarding the state of her child’s bottle usage: 0 represents not at all worried, and 10 represents extremely concerned…
