Essential Interviewing Skills for the Helping Professions ― A Social Justice and Self-care Approach

Essential Interviewing Skills for the Helping Professions reaches beyond most other essential skills for clinical interviewing books with its emphasis on social justice, attention to the role of microaggressions in clinical practice, and the upmost importance of practitioner wellness as integral to longevity in the helping professions. Each chapter addresses interviewing skills that are foundational to the helping professions from mental health to physical health, includes detailed exercises, addresses social justice, and discusses practitioner wellness opportunities. Sometimes clients' stories are fraught with trauma, other times their stories are bound within generations of substance addiction or family violence, while other clinical stories present personal and social obstacles that arise from years of oppression at the hands of prejudice and discrimination. This book therefore goes beyond the basic ideas of choosing when to use an open question or to reflect emotions by covering how to integrate social justice and knowledge of power, privilege, and oppression into the interviewing arena. Essential interviewing skills require the practitioner to not only purposefully listen to the client's story, but also to be self-aware and willing to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them. The work of the clinical interviewer is a continuous challenge of balancing listening, responding, action, and self-awareness, and this book is designed to help.

Nicole Nicotera, PhD, LICSW, is a social work educator and coordinator of the clinical skills training and the mind body courses for the Master of Social Work program at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work, where she also teaches mixed methods research for the PhD program. She is also a licensed independent clinical social worker with training and practice experience in the use of experiential therapies, expressive arts therapies, and other modalities with youth, family-youth groups, and couples. She is an active community engaged scholar and collaborates with community agencies to conduct research on their programs and help them use the results of that research to create stronger programs.