Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Social Work (Transforming Social Work)

188 Pages·2008·0.93 MB·English

by  Juliet Koprowska

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Communication and
Interpersonal Skills in
Social Work
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Transforming Social Work Practice – titles in the series
Applied Psychology for Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 071 8
Collaborative Social Work Practice ISBN 978 1 84445 014 5
Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 019 0
Courtroom Skills for Social Workers ISBN 978 1 84445 123 4
Effective Practice Learning in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 015 2
Groupwork Practice in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 086 2
Introducing International Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 132 6
Loss and Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 088 6
Management and Organisations in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 044 2
New Directions in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 079 4
Practical Computer Skills for Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 031 2
Protective Child Protection and Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 131 9
Reflective Practice in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 082 4
Research Skills for Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 179 1
Safeguarding Adults ISBN 978 1 84445 148 7
Service User and Carer Participation in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 074 9
Sexuality and Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 085 5
Social Work and Human Development (second edition) ISBN 978 1 84445 112 8
Social Work and Mental Health (third edition) ISBN 978 1 84445 154 8
Social Work and Mental Health in Scotland ISBN 978 1 84445 130 2
Social Work in Education and Children‘s Services ISBN 978 1 84445 045 9
Social Work Practice: Assessment, Planning, Intervention
and Review (second edition) ISBN 978 1 84445 113 5
Social Work with Children, Young People and their Families
in Scotland (second edition) ISBN 978 1 84445 156 2
Social Work with Drug and Substance Misusers ISBN 978 1 84445 058 9
Social Work with Looked After Children ISBN 978 1 84445 103 6
Social Work with Older People (second edition) ISBN 978 1 84445 155 5
Social Work with People with Learning Difficulties ISBN 978 1 84445 042 8
Sociology and Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 087 9
Studying for Your Social Work Degree ISBN 978 1 84445 174 6
Understanding and Using Theory in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 139 5
Using the Law in Social Work (third edition) ISBN 978 1 84445 114 2
Values and Ethics in Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 067 1
What is Social Work? Context and Perspectives
(second edition) ISBN 978 1 84445 055 1
Youth Justice and Social Work ISBN 978 1 84445 066 4
To order, please contact our distributor: BEBC Distribution, Albion Close, Parkstone, Poole,
BH12 3LL. Telephone: [phone], email: [email protected]. You can also
find more information on each of these titles and our other learning resources at
www.learningmatters.co.uk.
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Communication and
Interpersonal Skills
in Social Work
Second Edition
JULIET KOPROWSKA

Series Editors: Jonathan Parker and Greta Bradley
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First published in 2005 by Learning Matters Ltd.
Reprinted in 2006
Reprinted in 2007
Second edition 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from
Learning Matters.
© 2008 Juliet Koprowska
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 84445 153 1

The right of Juliet Koprowskato be identified as the Author of this Work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover and text design by Code 5 Design Associates Ltd
Project management by Deer Park Productions
Typeset by Pantek Arts Ltd, Maidstone, Kent
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow
Learning Matters Ltd
33 Southernhay East
Exeter EX1 1NX
Tel: [phone]
[email protected]
www.learningmatters.co.uk
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1
Communication skills: don’t they just come naturally? 5
2
What do we know about effective communication? 19
3
The human face of social work:
emotional communication 35
4
Getting started 51
5
Making progress and managing endings 71
6
Communicating with children 93
7

Working with families and groups 107
8
Working with people with ‘special communication
needs’: communicative minorities 125
9
Safety and risk: working with hostility 139
10
The demands and rewards of interpersonal work 154
Glossary 165
References 167
Index 175
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Acknowledgements
First, I would like to thank the service users and students with whom I have worked, for all
they have taught me about communication and interpersonal skills. Special thanks are due
to Una McCluskey for her intellectual acuity and vision, and her personal support. I also
wish to acknowledge the members of the Northern Attachment Seminar, and mentors,
peers and friends in the SCT® community, particularly Yvonne Agazarian, Claudia Byram,
Fran Carter, Susan Gantt, Dorothy Gibbons, Doug Johnson, Jon McCormick and Anita
Simon. I thank my colleagues at the University of York who made it possible for me to take
study leave to complete this book, and the Sisters of the convent of Santa Brigida in Rome
where I spent three weeks peacefully writing. I also thank the unnamed multitudes from
whom I have learnt how not to communicate.
I also want to thank Ray Haddock for his sustaining presence during the work on the
second edition.

vii
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Introduction
This book is primarily addressed to social work students who are soon to enter the first
period of practice learning, although it may also be of interest to experienced social work-
ers and other health and social care colleagues. Since practice learning starts at different
times on different programmes, the book is designed to be accessible to students in the
first year of the degree, but will still be of value to those in subsequent years of the pro-
gramme, and those studying at postgraduate level. Good communication skills are
essential to any form of social work practice, from therapeutic interventions through to
the most mundane bureaucratic activities. Whether you are dealing with a complex family
situation, or phoning the local council on their behalf about non-payment of rent, or writ-
ing a letter to the health visitor who referred them, you need to be able to communicate
well. This one example gives an idea of the diversity of communication, and shows that
social workers need to be able to move flexibly between different modes of communica-
tion and use them all effectively.
Requirements for social work education
The book aims to meet the Department of Health requirements for the honours degree,
which state that students need to learn how to communicate effectively with children,
adults and those with special communication needs. The National Occupational Standards
expect social workers to be able to:
l prepare for and work with people to assess their needs and circumstances;
l plan, carry out, review and evaluate social work practice;
l support individuals to represent their needs, views and circumstances;
l manage risk;
l manage and be accountable, with supervision and support, for their own social work

practice;
l demonstrate professional competence in social work practice.
The 2008 academic subject benchmark statement identifies five core areas in which stu-
dents need to acquire knowledge, understanding and skills:
l social work services, service users and carers;
l the service delivery context;
l values and ethics;
l social work theory;
l the nature of social work practice.
Within the benchmark, communication skills are a key part of social work practice.
1
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Introduction
Communication and interpersonal skills
Skills cannot be learnt solely from reading a book, however interactive the book may be.
It is in the nature of skills that they have to be practised in everyday life – try learning to
ride a bike from looking at a manual! Much of your learning and assessment of commu-
nication skills will take place in practice settings during encounters with service users and
fellow professionals, but a good deal is usefully undertaken in private study and in the
academic environment, where there is less immediate worry about ‘getting things wrong’
to the detriment of service users. This book will help provide you with the foundations
and scaffolding you need so that you will be able to build on your skills when you go out
into practice.
We currently lack a knowledge base for the best ways of learning and teaching communi-
cation skills, since the learning processes involved are complex and have rarely been
evaluated (Trevithick et al., 2004). In particular, evaluating thetransfer of learning to prac-
tice settings poses methodological challenges as outlined by Collins & Bogo (1986) and
Dickson & Bamford (1995)(Richards et al., 2005, p.410). This is not to say that learning is
not transferred; the issue is that we do not know exactly how.
Interpersonal skills are very different from the motor skills involved in riding a bike. We use
our minds and our feelings far more than in cycling, and we continually have before us
many choices about what to say or do next in any given situation. This is because commu-
nication is inherently interactive, so the scene is continually changing. The behaviour of
other people in an interaction is much less predictable than road surface or wind direction,
and our behaviour has an impact on the other person or people with whom we are work-
ing. We therefore bring consciousness and deliberation to interpersonal skills, and we
constantly reassess what is happening, from moment to moment. This happens between
people all the time, not just in social work encounters.
For this reason, this book draws on a wide range of literature, including communication
theory, linguistics, systems theory, social psychology, neuroscience, and empirical research
in health care, social work and psychotherapy. The aim is to promote your thinking, reflec-
tion and curiosity. As far as possible, the approaches suggested have some basis in
research evidence about what appears to be useful and acceptable to service users, and it

is grounded in social work values of respect for persons – including ourselves.
Book structure
Chapter 1 introduces some of the core concepts which underlie the other chapters,
drawn in particular from systems theory. It provides an understanding of communication
as interaction, and explains how feedback continually influences that interaction. It
shows how in social work contexts, social worker and service user form a communicative
system, and their interactions with each other constitute a continuous stream of feed-
back to each other.
Chapter 2 introduces the working alliance, the product of a good enough working rela-
tionship combined with sufficient skill to enable service users to identify and achieve goals
2