Accuracy of Investigations' Verbatim Notes of Their Forensic Interviews with Alleged Child Abuse Victims

• NCJ Number: 186846
• Journal: Law and Human Behavior Volume: 24 Issue: 6 Dated: December 2000 Pages: 699-708
• Author(s): Michael E. Lamb; Yael Orbach; Kathleen J. Sternberg; Irit Hershkowitz; Dvora Horowitz
• Date Published: December 2000
• Length: 10 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

A comparison of verbatim contemporaneous accounts of 20 investigative interviews with alleged child abuse victims and audiotaped recordings of these reports examined the accuracy of investigators’ notes from these interviews.

Abstract

The research took place in Israel. The research placed the interviewer utterances into four categories: (1) invitations, (2) direct utterances, (3) option-posing utterances, and (4) suggestive utterances. Results revealed that the verbatim notes did not include 57 percent of the interviewers’ utterances and 25 percent of the incident-relevant details provided by the children. These accounts also inaccurately represented the structure of the interviews. In addition, only 44 percent of the details provided by the children were attributed to the correct eliciting utterance type. Moreover, investigators systematically misattributed details to more open rather than more focused prompts. Findings underscore the superiority of electronic recording when the content and structure of investigative interviews require preservation. 38 references (Author abstract modified)