Lisening skills are paramount to social work Essay Example

Lisening skills are paramount to social work Essay Example Lisening skills are paramount to social work Essay Lisening skills are paramount to social work Essay Describe, demonstrate and analyse how listening skills are central to effective communication in social work practice. It is expected that you include your learning from all the role plays reflecting on feedback from the service users/peers and tutors. The following essay intends to describe, demonstrate and analyse the above statement, it will do this by giving definitions and analysis of the communication process, and it will also look at the importance of listening, meaning and interpretation. Also incorporated will be power indifferences within communication as will ethical issues and the use of anti-oppressive practices surrounding communication and social work practice. The essay will incorporate service uses feedback and knowledge gained in communication module classes throughout. To understand communication this essay will first describe the process through a commonly used simple communication model, with its basic elements, the communication source, the encoder, the message, the channel, the decoder, and the communication receiver. [Berlo:1960] a simple model of communication from Shannon and weavers, known as the process school of communication. Their model involved three elements, the transmitter, the person starting the communication process, and in between both of these the noise, any factors that interfere or undermine the communication taking place, this point was raised during service uses feedback in seminars, during a role to play a social worker was fidgeting, this was distracting and a phone rang, this is known as background noise. Finally there is the receiver, the person being communicated with. The communication process involves five major elements, the message, the transmission medium, the receiver and the feedback. The message is not the only information sent, it also includes emotions, which is what gives the words meaning, as words do not establish the full meaning or message being sent as interpretation plays a part in understanding meaning. There are three fundamental elements in interpretation, which are, the setting, the service user and the agency. It is my understanding that the relationship of the three elements of interpretation will define what interpretation is, and its importance in reaching the correct interpretation. (Gregory Bateson), anthropologist, stated that every communication sends two messages in unison with the basic message, this is called the Meta message, which is encoded and overlap on to the basic message. This indicates how the message is wished to be received, by using certain words, tone of voice (ect). Communication is a social interaction through messages, however it is a very complex multilevel event, one of Batesons theories on Meta messages, states that communication involves the communication of a relationship. How language is used, the words, tone, delivery of speech and facial expressions, can dramatically influence the way a person interprets the message. Meaning refers to the intention of a speaker to have some effect on the listener, which must be combined with proper conventions which communication realise the intended meaning, (to make clear). There are three major dimensions of meaning: 1. The evaluative dimension, in which receivers express the degree of favourable, or unfavourable ness towards the words. Evaluative scales include, good/bad, valuable/worthless, fair/unfair and honest/dishonest. 2. An activity dimension, is the one which expresses the perceptions of a receiver towards the amount of movement or activity in an object or event. Activity scales include, active/passive, fast/slow, vibrant/still, dynamic/static and varied/repetitive. The potency dimension, which represents the feelings of strength and weakness, that perceived by an individual. Potency scales include, serious/humorous, potent/impotent, strong/weak, heavy/light and hard and soft. [Saeed:215: 1994] These connotative meanings do not mean that people have the same evaluative meanings for words, but they tend to use the same time dimensions to judge words. meaning can refer to interpretation. When dealing with meaning and interpretation with children, they can appear to contradict themselves with the use of language that adults use. This is because they tend to take the adults questions in literal terms, in the feedback from the service users, it was pointed out that asking children how they feel is usually avoided as children have different perceptions of what feel means to adults and it can be a confusing question It also states in a guide interviewing children, that sentence structure is an important factor to consider, it is sometimes assumed that if a child knows all the individual words in the sentence, they therefore understand the whole sentence.