Lesson 4: Intentionality and Open/Closed Questions


Attention


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

Intentionality

When we are not in the "official" role of counseling someone (such as when we are counseling a friend), we can often engage in a dialogue that uses questions to get information. One difference between "Beginning Counseling" and "Expert Counseling" is the notion of intentionality.

When we, as experts, ask questions we have very specific goals in mind and we are acutely aware of these goals and they shape the way we ask the questions. In fact, it can be said that EVERYTHING we do in an expertly conducted counseling session is intentional.

This does not mean that you have not been GOOD at it! Intentionality simply means that we are always aware of our goals and those goals guide our actions.

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."

Click HERE for a whole list of examples of Open and Closed-ended questions!

Click HERE to view a WikiHow on "How to Ask Open-Ended Questions"


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?

Assessments

A large part of what we do when we are working with clients is gather information in a standardized way in order to complete assessments. Assessments are tools containing structured questions that evaluate a specific aspect of a person's life.

Some basic assessments that we conduct include "intake forms" and "applications" (such as for services or entitlements like Social Security.)

We have found a tremendous app called Psychology Assessments that contains a huge number of structured interview questions to gather data.

I actually don't get the notion of the app's icon...but, it is still a great app!

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:

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 A

Use the Psychology Assessments app described in this lesson to conduct a number of informal assessments with your peers or with family members. Do not use this tool to do any exploration of sensitive information with your family, at this point you are simply familiarizing yourself with the use of assessment tools. Reflect on the utility of the assessment you used and the impact the "structured set of questions" has on the process of collecting data.

For ONE of these sessions we would like you to record the interview...this means you will have to write down the questions that you want to ask so you can free up your iPad to record the session. Post a link to this session in the discussion.

There are some choices in terms of how you want to create a recording.

For more information on creating videos on your iPad click HERE.

Lesson 4 Discussion B

One of the most important differences between a beginning counselor and a professoinal counselor is "intentionality". This refers to the idea that we don't do counseling "shooting from the hip"...everything we do we do for a reason. We are learning skills in this class that when delivered well, will bring about predicted results.

Share about a "supportive counseling" moment in your life where you said something and it "backfired". Analyze how your "intent" might not have been the same as the "impact". Propose how you might have better approached that situation to match your "intent". (You can also use an argument...a place where we say a lot of things we don't intend to say...as an example in this discussion.