Page 17 - PartA
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Counselling Skills
5. Questioning
As you move through the counselling process, questioning skills become important.
There are two types of questions:
• Open-ended
• Closed-ended.
Open-ended questions are used to:
• Begin an interview
• Encourage the client to elaborate
• Elicit specific examples
• Motivate the client to communicate.
Open-ended questions are those that cannot be easily answered with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or
a very short phrase. They are not normally used to gain specific information but to
explore feelings and thoughts. For example:
– ‘How is that important to you?’
– ‘How did you feel when that happened?’
– ‘What are your reasons for saying that?’
– ‘Why do you think you responded in that way?’
Closed-ended questions are used to:
• Obtain specific information
• Identify the parameters of an issue
• Break into a narrative
• Define the boundaries of a narrative.
Closed-ended questions can be easily answered with ‘yes’, ‘no’ or a very short phrase.
For example:
– ‘What is the time?’
– ‘Have you got far to go?’
– ‘Do you want that?’
– ‘How will you pay for that?’
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