TESTING THE EFFECTS OF ACTIVE LISTENING

Active or empathic listening is a basic social work practice skill. Past research involving this skill has focused primarily on the relationship between level of empathy and ultimate outcome. Little research has focused on the more immediate effects of this verbal procedure. Focusing on the short-term affective impact of two types of active listening, this article describes a series of replications of an analog experiment. The results, which replicate across experiments, across dependent measures, across client situations and affect, and across experimenters, suggest that differently worded active-listening responses may lead to different short-term client affective outcomes. The implications of these results for future social work research and practice are discussed.