From my SW2105 written assignment. It was a reflection of an interview conducted with a teenager. Excerpt of the paper.
The interview was held at interviewee’s home, in a quiet and casual environment within her living room settings. It took place at about 10 on a Friday evening, when interviewee just got home from her dance practice and had already settled down comfortably. I explained the objectives of my assignment prior to the start of the interview session and she agreed to help me with it.
Due to the open-ended nature of this assignment, it was difficult to narrow down the scope of the conversation. However, upon starting the interview, the interviewee talked about her dance practice and it seemed like a good topic to focus on since it is a major part of her life right now. Hence, we talked about her dance commitments and the pressure she feels regarding time management and compromises she has to make on her family time, socializing and other aspects of her life. The interview was also interspersed with many small, casual talks, involving topics about food, school and family outings.
Social work practice emphasizes on the relational dimension in which building a grounded and trusted relationship is essential in the problem-solving process. Threvithick (2003) emphasizes the importance of a relationship-based approach in the context of client-centeredness and psychosocial practice. The helper-client relationship is a dynamic interaction of emotions, thoughts, attitudes and beliefs, which are based on mutual trust and understanding from both parties.
There are many fundamentals that social workers have to master in order to build a healthy and successful therapeutic relationship with the client. Okun (2014) highlights that these characteristics - self-awareness, honesty, congruence, ability to communicate, knowledge, ethical integrity as well as gender and cultural awareness - helps to facilitate an effective working relationship with the client.
This reflection paper aims to address several of these characteristics, in relation to the interview I conducted with my client.
Self-awareness is the central theme and the core element that embodies any human relationship, which also includes the helper-client relationship. The self is an important tool that the social worker needs to be skillful at using to develop and maintain trust of the client as well as to keep the momentum of the process. Hence, it is crucial that the worker is aware of his or her grounds, which encompasses the belief systems, values as well as personal needs and wants throughout this process. The worker brings the self to the professional practice and it significantly impacts how the client feels, think and behave.
While conducting this interview session, I realize I am able to engage the client well by searching for common grounds for us the relate to each other. It helps to build a worker stance in which I utilized the mimicking technique to imitate her use of language and seating posture. Such synchrony and similarity in mannerisms will allow the client to feel at ease. Additionally, I used small talk and self-disclosure appropriately to bridge the differences together. In this case, our differences in cultural background was not a barrier to our communication as we had a common topic to discuss i.e. dance commitments and its challenges.
