The question of question types in police interviews: A review of the literature from a psychological and linguistic perspective.

Abstract

The past two decades has seen a plethora of papers and academic research conducted on investigative interviews with victims, witnesses and suspected offenders, with a particular focus on questioning techniques and typologies. However, despite this research, there still remain significant discrepancies amongst academic researchers and practitioners over how best to describe types of questions. This article considers the available literature relating to interviews with children and adults from both a psychological and linguistic perspective. In particular, we examine how different types of questions are described, and explore the discrepancies between competing definitions.

Interviewing suspects: examining the association between skills, questioning, evidence disclosure, and interview outcomes

“…Griffiths and Milne (2006) have thus identified as skilled practice a questioning strategy that (in brief terms) would commence with an open question designed to elicit an initial account, which is subsequently followed by a series of probing questions that derive the necessary finer details, with appropriate closed questions only used whenever the given details still require resolution, validation, and Turning to those five question types that Griffiths and Milne (2006) 'Poor' questioning also includes 'leading' questions (e.g., Your boyfriend lives here, doesn't he? ), which have repeatedly in the literature been associated with suggestibility in prompting the interviewer's expected answer, particularly amongst more vulnerable suspects (Oxburgh, Myklebust, & Grant, 2010).…”

Finding a needle in a haystack: Toward a psychologically informed method for aviation security screening.

“…Second, questioning styles that elicit rich verbal accounts are also effective in discriminating between truth-tellers and liars (Milne & Bull, 1999;Oxburgh & Dando, 2011;Oxburgh, Myklebust, & Grant, 2010 (Blair, Levine, & Shaw, 2010). For example, if you claim to have studied at Oxford University, it would be reasonable to expect you to know how to travel on public transport from the train station to your college.…”

The Nordic Model of Handling Children’s Testimonies

“…The scientific perspective of investigative interviewing backs to the German scientist William Stern (1903Stern ( /1904 (Oxburgh et al 2010):…”