Potential Differences, Italian American Clients

Individual Differences

If you were to invite 20 people, one by one, into your of?ce for an interview, you would discover that each person was optimally comfortable with slightly different amounts of eye contact, personal space, mirroring, and other attending behaviors. The guidelines discussed previously are based on averages and probabilities. For example, if you interviewed Italian American clients, you might ?nd them, on average, desiring closer seating arrangements than clients with Scandinavian roots. However, this is not the whole story. There also will be times when a particular Italian American prefers greater interpersonal distance than a particular Scandinavian. If you expect all Italian Americans, all Scandinavians, all African Americans, all women, and so on to be similar, you are stereotyping. Differences between individuals are often greater than the average difference among particular groups, cultural or otherwise. Therefore, although you should be aware of potential differences between members of various groups, you should suspend judgment until you have explored the issue with each individual through observation and by directly discussing these issues.

MOVING BEYOND ATTENDING We now move beyond attending and on to other listening responses available to clinical interviewers. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to several interviewer techniques that encourage clients to talk about what is on their minds, not yours.

We would like to provide you with an authoritative guide to every potential interviewer response, complete with a structured format for determining which response should be used at which time during an interview. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the unique relationship between interviewer and client-and the interviewing process itself-is too complex for any such formula. Differences among clients make it impossible to reliably predict their reactions to various interviewing responses. Some clients react positively to responses we judge as poor or awkward; others react negatively to what might be considered a perfect paraphrase. This section breaks down nondirective interviewing responses into distinct categories, providing general guidelines regarding when and how to use these responses. Effectively applying a particular interviewing response constitutes the artistic side of interviewing, requiring sensitivity and experience as well as other intangibles you cannot absorb from a article. This may seem like bad news but it re?ects the true nature of the art.