The provenance of émigrés: the validity of measuring knowledge of places

ABSTRACT

Establishing the origin of those seeking asylum is essential but difficult as asylum seekers often cannot corroborate their origin claim with documents. The aim of the present study was to assess whether asking knowledge questions, sketch questions and impossible questions are valid methods to determine the veracity of an origin claim. Participants (N = 105) from Tilburg (truth-tellers), Maastricht (partial liars) and Gothenburg (full liars) were asked to convince an interviewer that they originated from Tilburg. Half of them prepared and half of them did not prepare themselves for the interview. They were asked 10 knowledge questions typically asked to assess the credibility of origin claims, 4 impossible questions and 1 sketch question. Participants from Tilburg answered more questions correctly than participants from Maastricht and Gothenburg. Performance also improved with preparation. Even though the results did provide some support for the validity of assessing claims about origin by asking knowledge questions, the differences between the groups were modest, and it was impossible to correctly identify all truth-tellers and liars. Changing the output modality from verbal answering to sketching contributed to the credibility assessment of origin claims, whereas impossible questions were not discriminatory.

KEYWORDS:

• Credibility assessment
• origin claims
• asylum procedure
• home town knowledge
• unexpected questions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tanja S. van Veldhuizen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1057-365X

Notes

1 The specific coding schemes can be provided by the first author upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme in Legal Psychology (EMJD-LP) [grant number FPA 2013-0036 with SGA 2013-1438].