Citation

Thoresen C, Lønnum K, Melinder AMD, Magnussen S. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2009; 23(7): 999-1011.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.1534

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The study was designed to investigate changes in how children are interviewed in cases of child sexual abuse over a fairly long period of time. The interviewers' utterances were analysed in a large sample of forensic interviews conducted in Norway during the period of 1990-2002. The results indicate that interviewer strategies have improved during this period; there is a decrease in the proportion of suggestive, yes/no and option-posing utterances, accompanied by a comparable increase in directive utterances. However, the frequency of open-ended utterances is low, and has not changed much over time. An index of the overall quality of the interviews likewise showed a positive trend, with an increase in the proportion of interviews that were labelled 'good'. However, even in recent years, interviews rated as 'inadequate' or 'poor' constituted half of the interviews conducted. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language: en