'Teknik Wawancara' : Exploring the Deep Well (Jonathan Handy)

One week has passed since my last article. Today, I will be discussing and reviewing about the topic held in Teknik Wawancara class on March 18th 2013. Today's topic is 'Social History'. However, for a change of pace, I will discuss this article in English, since this is the language in which I feel the most comfortable to use when writing an article or doing any writing task. Moreover, it has been a while since the last time I wrote an article in English.

Before I further discuss the article, I want you guys to take a look and think more about the title : Exploring the Deep Well. What kind of impression do you guys think when you read this sentence ?

Indeed, imagine that you were live in a countryside, since it might not be that weird that you would have a well in your house. Now let's think how deep is the depth of the well ? 2 metres, 5 metres, 10 metres or more ? Whatever number you would think of, let's say the well is dark, the further you explore, the darker it would be. How about human's life ?

Like a well, human's life is long. Of course, long or short is pretty much a relative number, however if you put one's life history into a book, I don't think a 'normal' person could even finish 1/100 part of a 17-year-old man within one whole week. Whenever a psychologist is presented a client in front of him or her, he/she needs to know the client's background, since the problem might be connected with his/her past.

Social history means a past of an individual. It is a bunch of story of one's life, in other words, it plays the important role as the part of that person. Knowing a client history would take us closer to the situation he or she is in. While putting an empathy on one might be harder without knowing how that person feels, knowing the social history of a client would take us there easier than without knowing anything.

Why do we need to know the social history of a person ?

While making a psychologist closer to a client and putting an empathy might be my own opinion as a 'side-dish', there're bigger reasons why we have to know the social history of a person, in this case, a client.

Firstly, no two people experience life in quite the same way. We might find ourselves having the same experience with other people, for example, let's say I and my friends, let's call them each as A, B, C and D, went to a friend's birthday party. We were together all the time, having the same food, and so on.

A might be feeling very happy there, since A is a very sociable guy, love to talk with other people, and hit with the girls. However that wouldn't be the same for B, who prefer to stay at home over going to this kind of party, since B doesn't really like to interact with other people. B might feel uncomfortable and kind of lonely and being separeted at the party. The situation for me, C and D also might be different story altogether.

In conclusion, all of us might have the same sensation, but the perception of each of us toward that sensation might be different. That's why when we need to know where the client comes from, how he/she feels toward a situation, which couldn't be representated by any other person, for example client's parents.

Secondly, we need to facilitate the telling of a client's story. What does this means ? It means what we have to treat is not the disorder itself, but the person with a disorder. We need to make a distinctive way between a psychologist and other 'similar' profession. We are here to cure a person with a disorder, that means we need to put that person into account.
We can't just leave it the way it is, by only taking the disorder itself into account, yet at first we need to know what and how our client does, so that the disorder can be treated well as a result.
The way how we put empathy to other people is pretty much have a high-correlation with this statement, which is to think the other party as a living being, as a human, not as a thing which only the disorder need to be treated.

Thirdly, we need to obtain sufficient information to conceptualize the origin of the client's difficulties. While I think the statement is clear enough to take the words the way it is, I will make a brief explanation about this. As we know more information about the client, shouldn't it is easier for us to assess the source of that client's problem ? Therefore, by knowing a client's social history, we also help ourselves to diagnose a client's problem and make an accurate treatment for him/her.

What do we need to know about a person's social history ?

There are a lot of things we need to know about a client's social history, however we also have limited energy and time. In this case, we need to divide the client into two groups in general ; children & adolescenes and adults.

The things we need to know for each group is different, since the things would be simplified to things that we really need to know. In general, things such as family history, medical history and personality traits and disorders are the common question that is important for us to progress with the client's social history.
The more specific areas, such as the questions regarding work history, legal history, religion, marital status, drugs abuse and substance, social network, etc for adults and questions like education, growing up, abusement, etc for children is a different way altogether.

Why ? Return to the first paragraph in this section, because we don't need to know every part of a person's life, since we only need to know things that would help us to diagnose the real source of that person's problem; therefore, we only need to ask things we need to know.

For example, we don't need to ask the elementary school and how she were back then to a 70-year-old woman should it doesn't even have any role in her problem, right ? Moreover, she herself might already forgotten about it, since it is way too long for her.

The last but not the least important thing that I get from this course is the importance of a genogram. As the word imply, a genogram, which is derived from 'gen' and 'gram' in English (please correct me if I'm wrong), is used to draw where a person's position in a family ;in other words, a kind of diagram which can describe the structure of a family lineage. By knowing that one simple thing, we could draw more conclusion about what, how, why, and when.

However, while it has been proven pretty useful to many experts and psychologists, the way how it is interpreted depends on the user's skill and knowledge. Therefore, it is advised that we need to have a lot of knowledge to draw a more correct conclusions. Although drawing an assumption is good, it is not good to make it as a tool that would lead to a wrong prejudice ;moreover, to make a wrong diagnosis that would lead to violation of psychologists' ethic codes. Despite its usage, one really need to be careful with it.

There are a lot of things I have learnt from last week's Teknik Wawancara class ;however, because of the limited time and knowledge, this is all I can write in this article. Thank you for your attention.

25 Maret 2013