Witness recall across repeated interviews in a case of repeated abuse.

In this illustrative case study we examine the three forensic interviews of a girl who experienced repeated sexual abuse from ages 7 to 11. She disclosed the abuse after watching a serialized television show that contained a storyline similar to her own experience. This triggered an investigation that ended in successful prosecution of the offender. Because this case involved abuse that was repeated on a weekly basis for 4 years we thus investigated the degree to which the child\u27s narrative reflected specific episodes or generic accounts, and both the interviewer\u27s and child\u27s attempts to elicit and provide, respectively, specific details across the 3 interviews collected in a 1 month period. Across the 3 interviews, the child\u27s account was largely generic, yet on a number of occasions she provided details specific to individual incidents (episodic leads) that could have been probed further. As predicted: earlier interviews were characterized more by episodic than generic prompts and the reverse was true for the third interview; the child often responded using the same style of language (episodic or generic) as the interviewer; and open questions yielded narrative information. We discuss the importance of adopting children\u27s words to specify occurrences, and the potential benefits of permitting generic recall in investigative interviews on children\u27s ability to provide episodic leads. Despite the fact that the testimony was characterized by generic information about what usually happened, rather than specific episodic details about individual occurrences, this case resulted in successful prosecution

Narrative coherence in multiple forensic interviews with child witnesses alleging physical and sexual abuse

This study investigated the narrative coherence of children's accounts elicited in multiple forensic interviews. Transcriptions of 56 police interviews with 28 children aged 3–14 years alleging physical and sexual abuse were coded for markers of completeness, consistency and connectedness. We found that multiple interviews increased the completeness of children's testimony, containing on average almost twice as much new information as single interviews, including crucial location, time and abuse‐related details. When both contradictions within the same interview and across interviews were considered, contradictions were not more frequent in multiple interviews. The frequency of linguistic markers of connectedness remained stable across interviews. Multiple interviews increase the narrative coherence of children's testimony through increasing their completeness without necessarily introducing contradictions or decreasing causal‐temporal connections between details. However, as ‘ground truth’ is not known in field studies, further investigation of the relationship between the narrative coherence and accuracy of testimonies is required

Dynamics of Repeated Interviews with Children

Concerns regarding repeat interviews with child witnesses include greater use of suggestive questions in later interviews due to bias, and that children may appear inconsistent and, therefore, be judged as less reliable in court. UK transcripts of first and second interviews with 21 child victims/witnesses (conducted by qualified interviewers) were coded for question types and child responses. Interviewers were consistent in their proportional use of question types across interviews. Furthermore, children were as informative in second interviews as in first, mostly providing new details consistent with their prior recall. Despite the apparent lack of training in conducting repeated interviews, no negative effects were found; second interviews appeared to be conducted as well as initial interviews and they provided new details without many contradictions. It is suggested that when a child’s testimony is paramount for an investigation, a well-conducted supplementary interview may be an effective way of gaining further investigative leads

A systematic examination of actor and trainee interviewer behaviour during Joint Investigative Interviewing Training

This study is the first systematic examination of trainee interviewer and actor behaviour during Joint Investigative Interviewing Training (JIIT) simulations across two training sites in Scotland. As expected, interviewers were poor at adhering to best practice interview guidelines in the pre-substantive and closure phases of the interviews. Although invitations were used within the range of best practice, they were not used more often and did not elicit more allegation-related details than directive questions. Critically, actors’ responses to invitations were less informative than their responses to all other question types. Furthermore, large differences were observed between the two training sites in the number of questions asked and amount of information elicited by interviewers. Our results show that 1) trainee interviewers are not utilising simulations to practice all required interviewing skills, 2) adult actors are not reinforcing interviewers’ use of invitations as intended, and 3) trainee interviewers are not being afforded the same opportunities to practice their skills due to variation in resources across Scotland. We recommend improvements to the JIIT programme to address these concerns

How children talk about events:Implications for eliciting and analyzing eyewitness reports

Legal and social service professionals often question whether various features of young witnesses’ responses during interviews are characteristic of children’s event reports or whether these features are concerning findings that reflect degraded memory, outside influence, or other phenomena. To assist helping professionals and researchers who collect data through interviews, we aggregated findings from child eyewitness studies and revisited transcript sets to construct fifteen principles that capture how children talk about events. These principles address children’s earliest event narratives, how children report information as interviews unfold and typical features of their narratives, threats to the accuracy of answers, the influence of interviewers’ language on children’s styles of reporting, how testimonies compare across multiple interviews and multiple witnesses to the same event, and the structure of accurate and inaccurate reports. A summary table highlights the implications of these principles for interviewers and the decision-makers who analyze children’s reports

Investigative Interviews with Victims of Child Sexual Abuse: The Relationship between Question Type and Investigation Relevant Information

This study examined the influence of question type during investigative interviews with victims of child sexual abuse on the number of items of Investigation Relevant Information (IRI) obtained during the interview. Twenty-one police interview transcripts from an English police force were analysed across different age groups. As predicted, more IRI was elicited from appropriate questions (e.g., open, probing, and encouragers) than from inappropriate questions (e.g., echo probes, closed, forced choice, leading, multiple and opinion/statement). Also as predicted, the number of items of IRI elicited increased with the age of the child witness, with older children disclosing the most items of IRI, regardless of whether the abuse was recent or historic