Interviewing Child Witnesses: Questioning Techniques and the Role of Training

Abstract

The last decade has seen major developments in the legal arena concerning the evidential interviewing of children. Research evidence clarifying the ability of children to provide valid and reliable information has been incorporated into the development of evidential interviewing techniques. This in turn has focused attention on the importance of training. Despite the increase in training, research with both child and adult interviewers has shown that inappropriate questioning strategies and poorly structured interviews still typify a significant number of investigations. This study evaluated the effect of a 1-week intensive training course on police and social worker forensic interviewing with children and investigated the actual types of questions employed by interviewers. Analysis of videoed interviews was used to compare trained and untrained interviewers on a series of rating scales designed to assess interviewer performance. The number of requests for free reports and the number of open, specific, leading, and nonleading questions used were obtained. The study found no differences in performance between trained and untrained interviewers on any rated behaviors with both trained and untrained interviewers rating poorly. Specific and leading questions were found to occupy over half the total number of questions used by both sets of interviewers, and few free report requests were used. That is, interviewers mostly asked the types of questions least likely to obtain valid and reliable information from children, with no evident variation from this pattern within the trained group. These findings echo the results of other studies in suggesting that interviewers use inappropriate questioning strategies to obtain information even after training and rely heavily on specific rather than open questioning. The results of this study suggest that the frequently adopted model of the short, intensive training course may not be the most effective way of training investigators to interview children, and more research is needed to establish the best way forward.

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