Examination of the consistency of interviewer performance across three distinct interview contexts

Abstract

The current study examined the consistency of investigative interviewers' performance (n=31) across three distinct interview paradigms: (a) a mock interview where an adult actor played the role of a child recalling abuse, (b) a mock interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event that was staged at the child's school, and (c) a field interview where the interviewer elicited a statement of abuse from a child. Performance was measured by calculating the proportion of open-ended and leading questions, and by eliciting expert ratings of the presence of a range of problem behaviours commonly exhibited by interviewers. Overall, the performance of individual interviewers was relatively stable across the tasks. Heterogeneity in stability, however, differed according to the type of question and the nature of the event being examined. In particular, the mock interview paradigm where the adult acted the role of an alleged child abuse victim produced a measure of performance that was more similar to the field interview than the interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event. The implications of the findings for trainers, and directions for future research, are discussed.

Keywords:

• investigative interviewing
• child sexual abuse
• interviewer training
• forensic psychology
• individual stability

Notes

1. Prior research suggests that field performance tends to remain consistently poor without ongoing refresher training in the form of practice and feedback (Lamb, Sternberg, Orbach, Esplin et al., 2002; Lamb, Sternberg, Orbach, Hershkowitz et al., 2002).

2. Baseline performance (prior to any recent training) has typically ranged in prior studies from 0.16 to 0.36 for open-ended questions and 0.16 to 0.59 for leading questions, whereas performance immediately after extensive practice and feedback sessions (i.e. maximum performance) ranges from 0.64 to 0.83 for open-ended questions and 0.01 to 0.03 for leading questions (Hughes-Scholes & Powell, 2008; Powell et al., 2008a,b). The scores lie well between the untrained and ‘extensively’ trained figures shown above, which is consistent with the fact that the current participants received minimal training (mainly instruction).