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INTERVIEWER: Let me ask you about in your PhD program, what interests developed? In other words, how
did you develop an interest in the kinds of subjects that you were eventually going to pursue?
KADUSHIN: Yeah, the PhD program- they didn't have a social work PhD program but they had a counseling
program and psychological counseling program in the school of education. So I took my degree with an
educational sociology as a matter of fact and my PhD thesis was also in terms of my interest in social work
education. The PhD thesis at that time I was teaching in Wisconsin because I did the thesis over a period of
three or four years. I didn't receive the degree until I had been here close to five years. I developed a thesis
around the fact that is it possible for students to sit in on interviews, view interviews that were conducted by
social workers in actual performance of the job. That was my thesis- it was to what extent is this possible
was the deleterious to the clinician's responsibilities to the client, or could this be a teaching tool. I would sit in
on the interview with the permission of the client and the worker. I would sit unobtrusively in the back and
to the left and at the end of the interview, when the client and the worker had finished the interview,
I interviewed both the client and the worker as to what they perceived as the intrusion of the observer.
So it was really a thesis related to social work education.
INTERVIEWER: Had students been sitting in before then? I mean, was it common to have students sit in?
KADUSHIN: No, this was entirely new.
INTERVIEWER: Ah, okay, because now it's fairly common when I think of it now.
KADUSHIN: Yes, and this was before videotaping and so on. It was even before audio taping so the students had
no access to an actual live interview between a real live social worker and a real live client.
INTERVIEWER: That was really- because when you said it, I ever on my own career going back forty years,
that was fairly common that you could sit in but when you, this was actually quite new.
KADUSHIN: Yeah, but that was the question that was raised. Is it damaging to the relationship and to the
needs to the client by having the intrusion of the student, and the fact that it proved not being
very damaging. Most of the time, as a matter of fact, after the first three or four minutes, the client was not
aware of the fact that I was sitting in.
INTERVIEWER: So in some ways this was really the beginning of an interest which - one of your focal points
throughout your scholarship in terms of interviewing- and I think at the beginning of, when I introduced us
at the first session, I mentioned that you're working now on the fifth edition of your book called The Social
Work Interview which has been published by Columbia University Press which is why I got Columbia mixed up
with NYU in the earlier thing. So that was really from your dissertation- it arose that interest.
KADUSHIN: Oh yeah, but all along, the interview is the ubiquitous activity of the worker. The only thing he's
doing is interviewing as a matter of fact. So even before that and that led me to the thesis, I was interested in the
interview because I was teaching part of that in the classes.
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