Active Listening

Below are some examples of active listening that include: Clarification, paraphrasing, reflections, and summarization. I deliberately left out interpretation and confrontation because there are so many factors and guidelines to those that they need their own post, so be on the lookout for more discussion on those topics in the coming weeks. Also, come next week for a question related to these topics below. 

Active listening requires you to, first, attend to a client’s verbal and nonverbal messages and, then, reflect back what you’ve heard and observed so that the client will know that his message has been understood accurately. Active listening skills are described below.

Clarification: Clarification is used in response to vague or unclear client messages. Using this skill is appropriate whenever you don’t understand a client’s message, would like a client to become more explicit, or wish to check your understanding of a client’s message. Clarification can also help a client to better understand what he has said.

Client: “Sometimes, I just want to get away from everything.”

Social worker: “Describe for me what you mean by ‘getting away from everything’.”

Paraphrasing: A paraphrase is a selective restatement of the main idea of a client’s message that resembles his message but is not identical to it. A paraphrase emphasizes the literal meaning of a client’s message (the content, rather than affect) and is expressed in fewer words than the client has used. For example:

Client: “I don’t want to get so wrapped up in my relationship with my girlfriend that I lose my ability to make my own choices and decisions.”

Social Worker: “Your independence is important to you.”

Particularly when used in conjunction with responses that highlight a client’s feelings, such as empathic responses, paraphrases are effective for encouraging a client to continue expressing himself. They can also be useful for bringing focus to an idea or situation that you would like the client to consider.

Reflection: The skill of reflection involves repeating or restating something a client has just said with an emphasis on the part of the message that is most helpful. Here are two examples of reflection:

Client: “Everything is so static in my life these days. I need things to change. The new things I try don’t work out the way I want them to. If I had a better job, I’d have some money to try more new things.”

Social Worker: “You’re ready for things to change in your life.” or

Social worker: “You feel frustrated in your efforts to change things.”

A key purpose of reflection is to build understanding. Reflection is effective for clarifying and showing clients what their here-and-now feelings are, which encourages them to continue expressing themselves. In this way, reflection helps clients understand their own feelings. Moreover, because reflection demonstrates your understanding of the client’s feelings, reflection is also a useful skill for establishing rapport.

Summarization: Summarization (summarizing) has several purposes and is used at different times in the intervention process. In all cases, however, its primary purpose is to tie together functionally related elements that occur at different times in the helping process.

Summarization can be used to highlight and pull together elements of what you and a client have discussed during the previous few minutes of an interview, with a focus on what is most relevant or significant. Summarization may be used in a similar way to recap a lengthy client message. Among other benefits, these uses of summarization are effective for bringing focus to an interview. For example, when a client rambles or brings up many different topics, you can identify one theme and narrow the discussion to focus on that theme. Summarization can also be used to tie together the factual and emotional components of several client messages, which is useful for helping a client see connections among several ideas or feelings he has expressed. Usually, this entails emphasizing themes or topics a client has repeatedly referred to in the current interview and/or in prior interviews. For example:

Client: “I can’t get along with my boss. He’s always telling me what to do. I know how to do the job better than he does. It’s not fair. This happens to me all the time, with every job I’ve ever had.”

Social worker: “It sounds like the main problem you have in jobs is that you don’t like bosses who exercise authority over you.”

In this example, the social worker has summarized more than one element of a message and appears to be referring to past messages as well. Finally, summarization may also be used to provide a smooth transition between topics, review progress made during an interview as it draws to a close, recap the highlights of a previous session, and review progress on tasks during the week between sessions. The latter applications are effective for providing focus and continuity between sessions.