What criteria do police officers use to measure the success of an interview with a child?

Abstract

This study used a mixed-methods approach to explore the perceptions of a heterogeneous sample of 75 police interviewers regarding their performance in a mock interview with a 5 Á7-year-old child. Each officer recruited for this study was authorised to conduct investigative interviews with children. Specifically, we explored how the officers' perception of what makes a good interview differs depending on their background experience and their (perceived and actual) ability to adhere to bestpractice interview guidelines. Overall, the officers' perceptions of what constitutes an effective interview were not entirely consistent with those held by experts in forensic interviewing. The majority of the interviewers perceived that the locus of control in the interview rested primarily with the child and/or the environmental setting. In contrast, experts tend to place the central onus of responsibility for the outcome of an interview on the skill of the interviewer in using open-ended questions. Several possible explanations for, and the implications of, these findings are discussed.

Contrasting the Perceptions of Child Testimony Experts, Prosecutors and Police Officers Regarding Individual Child Abuse Interviews

“…Consistent with prior research, the police professionals did not portray a clear sense of exactly what they needed to achieve in the interviews and the reason why they needed to minimize prompting as much as possible (Clarke & Milne, 2001;, Wright, Powell, & Ridge, 2007. We suspect that better understanding of interview procedure (i.e., the development of a strong theoretical rationale underlying certain procedures) may be a prerequisite of effective engagement in inter-agency discussion about the application and function of particular questions or interview techniques.…”

Interviewers’ approaches to questioning vulnerable child witnesses: The influences of developmental level versus intellectual disability status

“…Perceptions of what is an effective interview may also differ across groups of forensic professionals. Child testimony experts and prosecutors regard interrogators' question use as the primary influence on interview success, but interviewers emphasize children's characteristics (Powell, Wright, & Hughes-Scholes, 2011;Wright, Powell, & Ridge, 2007). For example, interviewers justified their use of closed-ended questions by arguing that the children had not been forthcoming in response to initial open prompts (Wright et al, 2007).…”

“…In order to test these contrasting hypotheses, we needed to take into account the children's contribution to the interaction in order to identify interviewer effects. That is, interviewing strategy may have reflected a response to the children's sparse descriptions of the events, rather than disability or developmental status (e.g., Wright et al, 2007). We therefore included the total amount of information reported by the children as a covariate.…”

Errors in the Identification of Question Types in Investigative Interviews of Children

“…Research evaluations need to move beyond the question of whether training is effective in promoting change to identifying how open-ended questions are learned and sustained by professionals. Greater focus in training programs on the identification, use and understanding of different open-ended questions would likely enhance long-term improvement in interviewer performance and improve interviewers' ability to judge their own competency (Powell, Fisher, & Wright, 2005;Wright, Powell, & Ridge, 2007 …”