Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 31, Issues 11–12, November–December 2007, Pages 1201-1231
Child Abuse & Neglect

A structured forensic interview protocol improves the quality and informativeness of investigative interviews with children: A review of research using the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2007.03.021Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective

To show how the results of research on children's memory, communicative skills, social knowledge, and social tendencies can be translated into guidelines that improve the quality of forensic interviews of children.

Method

We review studies designed to evaluate children's capacities as witnesses, explain the development of the structured NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol, and discuss studies designed to assess whether use of the Protocol enhances the quality of investigative interviews.

Results

Controlled studies have repeatedly shown that the quality of interviewing reliably and dramatically improves when interviewers employ the NICHD Protocol. No other technique has been proven to be similarly effective.

Conclusions

Use of the structured NICHD Protocol improves the quality of information obtained from alleged victims by investigators, thereby increasing the likelihood that interventions will be appropriate.

Introduction

Whereas Kempe, Silverman, Steele, Droegemueller, and Silver (1962) helped launch scholarly interest in physical child abuse with their landmark paper nearly 50 years ago, professional (and popular) interest in child sexual abuse came much later. It was prompted in part by dramatic increases in the numbers of reported cases, and by awareness that many cases of abuse might go unrecognized because the victims were the only possible sources of information and were seldom given the appropriate opportunities to describe their experiences to those who might have been able to help them. Indeed, because alleged victims are often the only available sources of information, considerable efforts have been made to understand how children's testimony can be made as useful and accurate as possible. Since 1990, furthermore, highly publicized cases in the United States (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Florida), Norway (Bergen), New Zealand (Christchurch), and the UK (Cleveland, Newcastle), among others, have drawn attention to the counterproductive ways in which alleged victims of sexual abuse are sometimes interviewed. In many such cases, inappropriate interview techniques appear to have compromised and contaminated the children's testimony, rendering it flawed and inaccurate (Bruck, 1999; Ceci & Bruck, 1995). The goals of this paper are (1) to summarize research designed to translate findings regarding children's memory, communicative skills, and social understanding and tendencies into specific interview strategies and techniques that should help prevent such notorious errors and problems in the future, and (2) to review studies demonstrating that the use of such techniques in over 40,000 interviews has dramatically improved the quality of investigative interviewing in a number of locations already.

Section snippets

The background: Basic research on interviewing and child development

Prompted in part by widespread publicity about the infamous cases mentioned earlier, many researchers have studied children's capacities to provide accurate information about their past experiences, while others have paid special attention to their suggestibility (see reviews in the last decade by Jones, 2003; Lamb, Orbach, Warren, Esplin, & Hershkowitz, 2006; Memon & Bull, 1999; Pipe, Lamb, Orbach, & Esplin, 2004; Poole & Lamb, 1998). Initially, most researchers conducted controlled studies in

The NICHD Investigative Protocol

The NICHD Protocol covers all phases of the investigative interview. In the introductory phase, the interviewer introduces him/herself, clarifies the child's task (the need to describe events in detail and to tell the truth), and explains the ground rules and expectations (i.e., that the child can and should say “I don’t remember,” “I don’t know,” “I don’t understand,” or correct the interviewer when appropriate). In many jurisdictions, law enforcement agencies requested the inclusion of

Evaluating the structured NICHD Protocol in the real-world

When we developed the structured Protocol, we expected that its implementation would improve the organization and quality of interviews with children of all ages so that interviewers using the protocol would use more open-ended utterances and fewer option-posing and suggestive utterances and would postpone option-posing questions until later stages of the interview. Because children in the protocol condition practiced responding to open-ended questions in the pre-substantive phase of the

Is the protocol suitable for interviews with young children?

Clearly, there are important differences between the autobiographical memory retrieval strategies and capacities of preschoolers and older children (Schneider & Bjorklund, 1998). Younger children tend to remember less information and to provide briefer accounts of their experiences than older children do (Baker-Ward, Gordon, Ornstein, Larus, & Clubb, 1993; Lamb, Hershkowitz, Sternberg, Boat, & Everson, 1996; Lamb, Hershkowitz, Sternberg, Esplin, et al., 2006; Lamb et al., 2000, Ornstein et al.,

Importance of training

As mentioned earlier, interviewer training depressingly often yields improvement in trainees’ knowledge but no meaningful changes in the ways in which they actually interview alleged victims. Recognizing this, training in use of the NICHD Protocol has always been accompanied by efforts to provide continued support, guidance, and feedback on interviewer behavior in interviews conducted after starting to use the Protocol. The incremental value of verbal and written feedback during the course of

Conclusion

The research briefly reviewed in this article demonstrates both (1) how much researchers and interviewers have collectively learned about children's communicative and memory retrieval capacities and (2) that this information can be used by interviewers to maximize the value of their investigative interviews with alleged victims of abuse. In other studies, we have also shown that a version of the Protocol can be used when interviewing witnesses who are not victims (Lamb, Sternberg, Orbach,

Acknowledgements

The authors also wish to acknowledge with sadness the many contributions of Kathleen Sternberg, who was centrally involved in efforts to develop and implement the NICHD Protocol but died prematurely. Many other colleagues, including Heather Stewart, Susanne Mitchell, Margaret-Ellen Pipe, and Hannah Shiloach, played major roles in the research program briefly described in this paper and we are indebted to them, as well as to the countless investigators who conducted the interviews from which we

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