The study evaluated the usefulness of repeat-interviewing of witnesses to crimes who were intoxicated by alcohol at the time of the incident and their first interview, and then re-interviewed when not intoxicated the following day. Sixty young, social drinkers were divided into three groups. One group was given a "placebo" (alcohol-like) beverage, a second was given a "low dose" of alcohol (0.2 g/kg men; 0.17 g/kg women), and a third was given a "high dose" of alcohol (0.6 g/kg men; 0.52 g/kg women) over a 15 minute period. Twenty minutes later they viewed a 4-minute video of a crime, and afterwards they were given two opportunities to recall everything that they could remember from the incident; the first opportunity was immediately after the event, and the second was 24 hours later. Analyses of the quantity and accuracy of the details recalled revealed no overall increase in the total amount of information recalled between the first and second recall opportunities. However, on average, 18% of the details recalled by participants in the second test were new and accurate. The incidence of contradictions between the first and second recall opportunities was less than 1%. Surprisingly, none of the effects were influenced by alcohol, even at the highest dose. The results imply that 1) memory for at least some incidents observed under the influence of alcohol is resilient even up to relatively high blood-alcohol levels; and 2) the repeated interviewing of witnesses who were intoxicated at the time of the crime can reveal additional, reliable information that is not present at the initial interview, just as is the case for non-intoxicated witnesses.

Summary This study investigated the narrative coherence of children's accounts elicited in multiple forensic interviews. Transcriptions of 56 police interviews with 28 children aged 3–14 years alleging physical and sexual abuse were coded for markers of completeness, consistency and connectedness. We found that multiple interviews increased the completeness of children's testimony, containing on average almost twice as much new information as single interviews, including crucial location, time and abuse‐related details. When both contradictions within the same interview and across interviews were considered, contradictions were not more frequent in multiple interviews. The frequency of linguistic markers of connectedness remained stable across interviews. Multiple interviews increase the narrative coherence of children's testimony through increasing their completeness without necessarily introducing contradictions or decreasing causal‐temporal connections between details. However, as ‘ground truth’ is not known in field studies, further investigation of the relationship between the narrative coherence and accuracy of testimonies is required.

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This study is the first systematic examination of trainee interviewer and actor behaviour during Joint Investigative Interviewing Training (JIIT) simulations across two training sites in Scotland. As expected, interviewers were poor at adhering to best practice interview guidelines in the pre-substantive and closure phases of the interviews. Although invitations were used within the range of best practice, they were not used more often and did not elicit more allegation-related details than directive questions. Critically, actors’ responses to invitations were less informative than their responses to all other question types. Furthermore, large differences were observed between the two training sites in the number of questions asked and amount of information elicited by interviewers. Our results show that (1) trainee interviewers are not utilising simulations to practice all required interviewing skills, (2) adult actors are not reinforcing interviewers’ use of invitations as intended, and (3) trainee interviewers are not being afforded the same opportunities to practice their skills due to variation in resources across Scotland. We recommend improvements to the JIIT programme to address these concerns.

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