Developing and Evaluating a Training Programme in Legal Psychology for Finnish Asylum Officials

Abstract

Recent research has questioned the accuracy of asylum decisions, as asylum officials only partly follow evidence-based interviewing methods and hold assumptions regarding human memory and behaviour that are not supported by psychological science. To correctly and effectively adjudicate asylum claims, asylum officials need more training in evidence-based interviewing and decision-making methods. We developed a novel 75-hour-long hybrid training programme in legal psychology for asylum officials and evaluated its effectiveness in a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study with a waitlist control group. We measured the participants’ knowledge about relevant legal psychology topics such as memory and interviewing, and their ability to identify, evaluate, and produce appropriate interview questions in an online test. The training had a large positive immediate effect (d = 1.67) on the test scores and that the improvements remained after a follow-up period of 5 months. The results indicate clear support for the utility of the novel training programme. Future studies should assess the transfer of the acquired knowledge to actual asylum adjudications.