Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Social Work

Juliet Koprowska

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526453952
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Communication and Interpersonal Skills in Social Work are at the heart of effective social work practice. This book offers students a solid grounding in the core knowledge and skills of communication needed for effective practice. The book takes the key theories in communication and explains them in a systematic and practice-related way, essential for both undergraduate and postgraduate students to develop a critical understanding of the subject. This crucial fifth edition supports students with core communication skills by providing in-depth coverage closely interwoven with learning features that engage, stimulate and challenge. Working with children, adults and those with learning difficulties are all fundamental aspects of the book making it useful to students of all disciplines.

1 Communication skills: don’t they just come naturally?

Achieving a social work degree

This chapter will begin to help you to develop the following capabilities from the Professional Capabilities Framework (2018):

• 1. Professionalism
• 5. Knowledge
• 8. Contexts and organisations

See Appendix 1 for the Professional Capabilities Framework Fan and a description of the nine domains.

It will also introduce you to the following standards as set out in the 2019 social work subject benchmark statement:

• 5.2 Social work theory
• 5.5 The nature of social work practice
• 5.14 Intervention and evaluation
• 5.15 Communication skills

See Appendix 2 for a detailed description of these standards.

Introduction

In this chapter, some of the key concepts used in the remainder of the book are introduced and explained, with practice examples to help you make sense of them. There are also exercises and case studies to help you engage with the subject. The chapter lays the foundation for two themes which will keep emerging in the course of the chapters to follow.

The first is that communication is by definition interactive and always takes place within a relationship. This means that we need theories of interaction to make sense of it and because the language we use creates the relationship.

The second is that communication is context-related. It does not happen solely within the confines of a relationship, but in a larger world which affects both the nature of the relationship and the nature of the communication that properly takes place within it.

Communication undoubtedly ‘comes naturally’ to human beings, since we are a social species: we seek out the company of other human beings and rely upon our connections with each other for both our physical and psychological well-being. If you stand in the street watching how people behave, you will notice that they are frequently in communication – making eye contact, smiling, touching, talking, phoning, texting, gesturing, signing. In infants, the stark need for successful communication can be witnessed. Before a baby is born, the mother’s body meets the baby’s requirements without her conscious involvement. Prospective mothers often take steps to ensure their unborn child is well-nourished and not exposed to harmful substances, and they will also communicate with them, singing to them, talking to them or feeling them through the stomach wall, and these activities may well contribute to the baby’s development. After birth communication is essential since the baby’s survival depends on someone older understanding and meeting its physiological and emotional needs. This is also the beginning of the baby’s learning how to communicate and how to read other people’s signals, in which mutual imitation plays an important part. There is a growing body of evidence that the human brain needs to be in communication with other human brains to develop, and that this depends on appropriately loving contact. We are ‘wired’ for communication. This will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

Communication is so central to social life that Paul Watzlawick and his colleagues famously declared: one cannot not communicate. They reach this conclusion by way of the following argument:

behavior has no opposite … one cannot not behave. Now, if it is accepted that all behavior in an interactional situation has message value, i.e., is communication, it follows that no matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate. (Watzlawick et al., 1967, pp.48–9)

In this sense, communication just is, and is happening all the time when people are together. Every social situation entails communication and therefore calls up communication skills. Even when we are trying to avoid communicating with someone, we are communicating something (I don’t want to talk to you right now, or I’m angry with you, or I’m avoiding you, etc.). To describe how strangers sharing public space communicate without becoming involved, Goffman (1963) coined the term civil inattention (p.84). This denotes acknowledgement of the other’s presence without fear or hostility, followed immediately by withdrawal of one’s attention (p.84). So from the intimacy of the early relationship of mother and newborn baby, through to the much more attenuated ‘connections’ between strangers in public places, people are using interpersonal skills. Most social work activity takes place somewhere in between these two extremes. So how do we begin to build on all the knowledge and experience we already possess about communication and think about its dimensions from a social work perspective?

Metacommunication, rules, conversation analysis and habitus

Through the experience of living in social environments we learn a wide range of social cues and behaviours. A number of different branches of enquiry indicate that while we know how to communicate, our interactional behaviour is taken for granted and goes unexamined. Watzlawick et al. (1967) argue that although we communicate all the time, we have little conscious awareness of the communicative rules that we are putting into practice. Much of what we know is not obvious to us, and we have difficulty in identifying, naming and discussing how we are communicating. The problem arises, they say, because we can only communicate about communication by communicating – so it is easier to become confused than, say, when we are communicating about geography. They give this special form of communication about communication the name metacommunication, which indicates that they are taking a bird’s eye view of the process. They are particularly interested in understanding the rules of communication, the pattern rather than the content.

Conversation analysis (CA) offers another way of examining the taken-for-granted ways in which we interact. As the name suggests, it is a means of analysing conversations. It is a branch of sociolinguistics, starting with the work of Harvey Sacks in the 1960s (see Drew and Heritage, 1992; Silverman, 1997). Everyday personal conversations such as telephone calls and family mealtimes are studied, and there is also a literature concerning what is called institutional talk, studying the ways in which talk is conducted in, for example, medical consultations, counselling sessions, court cases, helplines, social work meetings, and so on. Conversation analysis looks at the sequences in conversations. Predictable patterns occur created by following social norms, and we may only become aware of this when norms are not followed. For example, CA identifies adjacency pairs, i.e. conversational elements that predictably occur in sequence. Adjacency pairs include greetings, and questions and answers. When I have asked a class to discuss how they say hello in their place of origin, regional variations emerge, some of which are unintelligible to people from other areas. For example, terms from different parts of Yorkshire include: Na then and Yer right? If you are greeted with a term that you do not recognise, or which you recognise as a greeting but do not use, a momentary hesitation occurs and the conversation becomes momentarily uncomfortable. Questions and answers are another instance of an adjacency pair, with a predictable sequence – the answer comes after the question. If we ask a question and the other person hesitates, we immediately realise that something is happening, and we may repeat our question in a different form or say something that shows we are trying to make sense of the hesitation. For instance:

A: Are you free tonight?

B: (pause) Erm …

A: It’s fine if you’re not, I just thought …

The social awkwardness of not answering a question directly is felt before we think about it. As discussed further in Chapter 5, we do not answer every question that service users put to us (especially about our personal lives), and we have to hold back what may come naturally in these situations.

Bourdieu, as discussed by Maton (2008), uses the term habitus to describe how we behave in the world according to unspoken norms in any given context. We draw on our past cultural experiences, including our ways of thinking, feeling and communicating. Our habitus also creates norms and evolves over time. We only tend to become aware of our own habitus when we encounter situations where habitus differs. This may be another way of indicating that the ‘rules’ which govern not just language, but broader aspects of our communication and behaviour, exist outside awareness. The process of learning new communication skills necessitates a greater level of self-awareness, and it is arguable that, as social workers, we need to maintain a higher level of self-awareness than the everyday transactions of life demand, as we are always working with new people, and dealing with the unexpected.

The communication skills which come naturally are an expression of habitus, being those we use all the time in navigating our way through our lives and relationships. We have learnt them in a whole variety of environments, in our homes, with our friends, in school, in work. The ones which come less naturally are those which take us beyond habitus into new areas, where we need to learn new rules, and we may at first make mistakes in applying them until our abilities evolve. The concept of metacommunication helps us to understand and analyse the pattern of what happens, and revise our behaviour in response.

I find it helpful to think in terms of first- and second-order skills:

• First-order skills are those required in direct communication itself, with service users, colleagues and others;
• Second-order skills are those employed in planning our communication strategy, thinking about what we are doing, observing interactions, paying attention to feedback, reviewing what has happened, and modifying our next and future communications accordingly.

(Koprowska, 2000)

First- and second-order skills are both essential to social work and the terms ‘first’ and ‘second’ are not evaluative. The two types could equally be called ‘skills’ and ‘metaskills’, as second-order skills are skills in thinking about skills. Second-order skills are akin to the essential professional activities which Donald Schön (1983) refers to as reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.

Activity 1.1

Imagine you have just started a placement in a supported housing service for young people aged 18–25. Dean, aged 19, had a job in a fast food outlet but was sacked after an argument with a customer. Your practice educator asks you to talk with Dean about the incident. This is the first time you have met him. Without thinking too much about it, after telling Dean who you are, you say, ‘ So how come you lost your job?’ He replies with, ‘I didn’t do nothing, it wasn’t my fault, the manager had a down on me from the start!’ and starts swearing about the manager. You had not expected him to get angry and upset, and suddenly feel out of your depth.

Use your second-order skills to review how the interaction went, and to devise some different approaches to this delicate sub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Publisher Note
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Communication skills: don’t they just come naturally?
• 2 What do we know about effective communication?
• 3 The human face of social work:understanding emotion and non-verbal communication
• 4 Getting started
• 5 Making progress and managing endings
• 6 Communicating with children and families
• 7 Working with groups
• 8 Working with people with additional communication needs: communicative minorities
• 9 Working with involuntary service users
• 10 Safety and risk:working with hostility and deception
• 11 The demands and rewards of interpersonal work
• Appendix 1 Professional Capabilities Framework
• Appendix 2 Subject benchmark for social work
• Glossary
• References
• Index