OARS

OARS is an acronym used in Motivational Interviewing (MI) to represent core interviewing skills. OARS stands for open-ended questions, affirmations, reflection, and summaries (Miller & Rollnick, 2013). Open-ended questions, affirmations, and summaries will be discussed here. If you want to review information on reflections please click here.

Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions require that patients respond with more than a yes, no, or other one word answer. Often MI sessions involve asking an open-ended question and then using reflections. Open-ended questions often foster engagement. Questions are important in the MI process but they can limit patient exploration. Therefore, it is recommended that providers combine the use of reflections and questions (Miller & Rollnick, 2013)

Affirming

Affirming involves accentuating the positive. When a provider affirms, they recognize the good. This includes the patients overall worth as a human. Affirmation also includes support and encouragement. Affirmation assists with engagement because it builds trust and can also can limit defensiveness.  According to Linehan et al. (2002) affirmation can also assist in continuing treatment (as cited by Miller & Rollnick, 2013).  Affirmation can come from the provider and the provider could help the patient to be the source of affirmation.

Summary

Summaries are a type of reflection. Summaries pull together several things that the patient as discussed. Summaries are used to assist patients to hold on to or reflect upon many things that they have discussed (Miller & Rollnick, 2013)

There are different types of summaries:

  • Collecting summary – These are used to connect interrelated conversational items.
  • Linking summary – To use this type of summary the provider connects what the person said to something discussed previously.
  • Transitional summary – This type of summary is typically used to end a task or session. It is used to put together what is important and/or transition to a new topic.

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