Five things child and family social workers need to know about Motivational Interviewing

1. What is Motivational Interviewing?

It is common to think of Motivational Interviewing (MI) as a set of communication skills including open questions, affirmations, reflections and summaries (OARS). These skills matter a great deal, but they are not really what MI is about. Miller and Rollnick, the founders of MI, argue that its spirit – partnership, acceptance, compassion and evocation – is what gives those skills their meaning. The techniques are simply ways of putting those values into practice (Miller and Rollnick, 2023).

A worker can ask open questions, offer reflections and summarise what someone says, yet still approach them from a fundamentally judgemental or pessimistic perspective. That is not MI in any meaningful sense. Equally, someone who genuinely believes that people have strengths, autonomy and the capacity for change will often use many MI skills naturally, even without formal training.

Miller and Rollnick compare the relationship between the spirit and the skills of MI to the relationship between the music and words of a song. Knowing the words is not the same as hearing the music. In the same way, MI is more than a collection of techniques; it is the values that give those techniques meaning.

2. What isn’t Motivational Interviewing?

MI helps people explore and resolve their own ambivalence about change. It cannot create motivation where none exists, nor can it remove the social and economic barriers that often make change difficult. When practitioners use MI simply to steer people towards a predetermined outcome, or act as if motivation is the only problem, it is likely to feel manipulative rather than collaborative – and it probably will not work anyway.

A striking example comes from Denmark, where police officers were trained to use MI with people whose applications for asylum had been refused (Kohl, 2022). The aim was to encourage them to return voluntarily to their country of origin. Used in this way, MI attempted to reduce a complex legal and social situation to a question of individual motivation. Unsurprisingly, it proved largely ineffective.

The lesson for child and family social work is not that MI has no place in statutory practice. Rather, MI is not a way of making people do what we want them to do. It works best when practitioners are honest about what is and is not negotiable, while remaining genuinely curious about the family’s own goals, concerns and motivations.

3. Why is it difficult to learn?

Many social workers will be familiar with at least the basic principles and skills of MI. Becoming genuinely proficient is much harder.

Research consistently shows that practitioners tend to overestimate their own competence, a finding that reflects the broader Dunning–Kruger effect, whereby people with lower levels of skill are often least able to recognise their own limitations (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Forrester et al. (2008) found something similar in social work. Practitioners attended a two-day workshop on MI, which had a modest positive impact on their communication skills overall. However, those who believed they had learned least from the workshops, because they already considered themselves proficient in MI, were also the group most likely to demonstrate relatively poor MI skills when their practice was independently observed.

Real competence develops through repeated practice, coaching, observation and structured feedback, not simply by attending a two-day course.

4. Why does child and family social work need an adapted version of MI?

MI is best understood as a communication style rather than a model of intervention. It can be used alongside, and as part of, Signs of Safety, systemic practice, strengths-based approaches and many other practice frameworks.

That said, MI was originally developed for addiction treatment, where practitioners usually work with a single adult who has voluntarily sought help. Child and family social work is fundamentally different. Conversations take place in the context of statutory authority, involve competing interests, and require practitioners to keep the child’s welfare in view alongside the wishes of parents and carers.

For this reason, Forrester and colleagues argue that generic MI needs adapting for child and family social work. Alongside traditional MI skills of empathy, collaboration and autonomy support (‘care and engagement’), they identify additional ‘good authority’ skills, including purposefulness, clarity about concerns and maintaining a consistent focus on the child. These are not alternatives to care and engagement but complements to it. Whittaker’s research found that parents’ expressions of problem recognition and motivation to change were more strongly associated with these child-and-family-specific skills than with traditional MI skills alone, but crucially that the good authority skills don’t ‘work’ in the absence of good ‘care and engagement’. Skilled practitioners combine warmth with authority, rather than seeing care and control as opposites.

5. What does the evidence actually show?

Compared with many communication approaches used in social work, MI has one of the stronger research bases. The evidence from health, addiction and mental health services is extensive. The child and family social work evidence base is smaller but growing.

Forrester and colleagues found that social workers could improve their skills through structured MI training and coaching, and that families showed higher levels of engagement (Forrester et al., 2019). More recently, an evaluation of MI training in Finland found mixed results overall, with some practitioners improving substantially while others changed little, reinforcing the importance of ongoing coaching and feedback rather than one-off training (Aaltio et al., 2026).

Overall, the evidence suggests that MI can improve the quality of conversations between social workers and families. What remains less certain is the extent to which those improvements translate into better long-term outcomes for children.