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 5–7-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 best-practice 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.

Keywords:

• Forensic interviewing
• investigative interviewing
• police interviewing
• child witness

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant (LP0347170). The authors would like to thank the participating police officers as well as Carolyn Hughes-Scholes for their assistance with this project. This work was completed as partial requirement of the first author's Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Notes

1. Note that specific details regarding the participating organisation are omitted to maintain anonymity.

2. A supplementary analysis was performed whereby interviews were divided into three groups. Group A contained those interviews where the child was described as performing well (n=34). Group B contained those where the child was described as not performing well (n=12) and Group C contained those interviews where no specific tone in relation to the child's performance was discernible (n=29). A t-test revealed that for those interviews in Group A, the number of event-related details elicited by the interviewer (M=6.88, SD = 3.24) was significantly higher than for those interviews in Group C (M=4.17, SD = 3.41, t(44) = 2.47, p<0.05). This was found irrespective of whether the analysis was performed on the number of pre-determined event details recalled by the child or the number of event-related words.