Lesson 4: Open and Closed Questions

Attention

In preparation for this Lesson, read Chapter 4 in your textbook

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this lesson's material, students will be able to:

• Identify the intentions associated with closed and open-ended questions
• Demonstrate the use of questions to get clients to elaborate on their story
• Demonstrate the use of questions to assist students in providing concrete data
• Describe the use of questions to perform assessments
• Aware of screening and assessment strategies for trauma (MHTR/C Outcome)

Teaching

Reading

Chapter 4: Questions - Opening Communication

Questions

Questions are essential to the counseling process...we ask both Open- and Closed-Ended questions when we intend to get different kinds of information.

Open Ended Questions allow our clients to elaborate and we purposefully choose to use these in order to elicit more details about their story

Closed Ended Questions assist us in the process of gathering facts about the situation...these generally elicit yes, no, and other specific answers.

Example: Think of this question: "Are you sure that what you did is the best way for you to handle this situation?

While this may seem like an open-ended question, it is actually a Yes-No question! A better approach for this type of question might be..."Tell me more about what you think regarding your decision to act this way."

Starting the Interview

Depending on how well you have come to know the client, you likely will start the process of the interview by asking open ended questions. You want your CLIENT to talk MORE than you do!

Asking questions also keeps you from making the mistake of trying to fix the problem too soon. Your goal is to get THEM to come up with a solution, not to create one for them...that is called ADVICE. Advice has a role, but later in the process.

Getting Concrete

Sometimes when clients are talking they might be a bit vague about things...statements like these:

• He is mean to me
• I feel depressed
• I'm not sure if all this is worth it
• I am very frustrated

If you think about each of these, each of us has a different perspective of what each of these mean...so, we really don't know what the client means either! So we need to press for details:

• In what ways is he mean to you?
• Tell me a bit more about what you do when you are depressed
• When you say you are not sure if this is all worth it, are you having thoughts of suicide?
• What does frustrated mean to you?

Exploring Trauma

When we are in the process of getting to know someone and why they have come to us for help, we want to use Open and Closed Questions to explore any history of Trauma that they may have. We might use tools developed for this purpose or we may utilize a series of questions we develop ourselves.

Click the links below to review a very comprehensive presentation on Trauma Assessment (pay special attention to slides 48-52 as these focus on the use of questions to explore this area)

PDF version (you will find the above noted slides on pages 24-26)
PowerPoint Version
Please do not print these out....the PDF version is 50 pages long! Save a Tree!

Stages of Recovery

Many of us encounter individuals at various points in their recovery from trauma (or from illness of any kind). In that the basic appraoch in Psychosocial Rehabilitation is to "meet the person where they are at", it is important that we interact with these individuals in line with where they are at in the recovery process.

Just as we act differently when someone is in different phases of a crisis, so we act differently when we are exploring where someone is at in their recovery process.

This lesson presents two models for understanding the process of recovery:

• Stages of Recovery by T. Gorski
• Stages of Recovery by Drs. Charles and Barbara Whitfield

Assessment and Too Many Questions

We use questions to gather information but we also don't want to bombard our clients with a list of questions. The interview should go much like a fairly one sided discussion...they talk, you listen.

Assessment

Lesson 4 Quiz

Exploring the details of someone's history, trauma, circumstances is one of the most important aspects of our counseling skills. Way before we start working on solutions we need to get all the "gory details"...the "devil" may be in these details, but so are many components of the solution to the problem!

1. Describe why we might be reluctant to go into the "details" of someone's trauma and why we might have a tendency to rush into solution making before we get the whole story.

Lesson 4 Discussion

Share a story about when you have been interviewed or had to interview someone. Describe how questions may have been used well (or not well) to achieve the goals of the interview. Can questions sometimes be phrased in a way that make them easier to misunderstand? Examples?