Interpret Methods in Asking Questions
Instructions
You may have conducted interviews in which you found yourself exhausted after only 5-10 minutes. You may have realized that you ware working so much harder than the interviewee, which should have been a ‘red flag’ suggesting that you were using closed questions (“How old is that sister?” “Is she married?”). If you allow the person to keep answering with one-word answers, it becomes more like a guessing game. When you switch to well-formulated open-ended questions (“What can you tell me about your relationship with your sister?”), you are likely to get much more useful information to help the interviewee to move forward.
Assignment Instructions:
If you are like most people, you have at some point in your life played the game, “20 Questions.” In this game, Player 1 thinks of a person, place, or thing, and Player 2 tries to guess what it is, but can only ask closed questions that Player 1 can only answer with “Yes” or “No.”
For this assignment, you will conduct two separate role-played interviews. Have your volunteer think of any two problems they might be facing in their life (preferably not real but imagined). They can be as wild and crazy as they would like, such as, “My llama ate my dining room table, so now I won’t get my deposit back on the apartment” and, “My roommate is a werewolf.”
For Scenario 1, you must play “20 Questions” to determine what your interviewee’s imaginary Problem #1 is. You only get 20 questions, and only “Yes-No” answers are allowed.
For Scenario 2, you must determine what your interviewee’s Problem #2 is, but you are allowed to ask open-ended questions.
Based on your two mock interviews, imagine you have been asked to speak to an undergraduate Counseling Skills course. Create a presentation to compare the results of the two mock interviews. Include the following in your presentation:
• Explain how different kinds of questions are used for different purposes in interviews.
• Compare your experiences with both types of questions in this exercise. Which method of questioning felt more natural to you, and which felt like more work? Explain how your interviewee’s responses differed across the two sessions.
• Recommend questioning strategies to obtain needed information from clients, and then relate them to your future work as a helper.
Support your assignment with at least five scholarly resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources may be included.
Length: 4-5 pages
