Testing the effectiveness of a blended vulnerable witness training for forensic interviewers

Abstract

The current study tested the effectiveness of a compact (18 hour) and blended (involving online and face-to-face components) training course, adapted from a previously evaluated course found to be successful in fostering long-term change in interviewing skill. The compact course was developed by trimming the previous course to only include learning activities that empirically demonstrated improvement of interviewing skills. There were 41 US forensic interviewers, with prior training experience, who took part in the research. Their interviewing habits were assessed using standardized mock interviews immediately prior to, and at the conclusion of training. A subset were assessed 9-24 months later. Results demonstrated that, despite reductions in length and content, training was effective in the short term and the subset maintained trained behaviors up to 24 months after completion. Results suggest that adjustments to training can be effective if the training remains founded on principles of human learning.

Effectiveness and efficacy of a culturally adapted training program for child interviewers in Chile.

“…The findings also demonstrated the capacity of the adapted training to sustain improved skills. As in a previous adaptation of Benson and Powell’s (2015) program in the United States (Lawrie et al, 2021), the Chilean-adapted training yielded long-lived evidence-based behavior—including open-ended question use—up to 21 months after training in controlled conditions, as predicted. Although the proportion levels of open-ended questions decreased in the long term in field interviews, they remained superior to the baseline levels showing long-term training effects for this fundamental skill (Powell, 2008).…”

“…So far, evaluation research has evidenced the relatively short-lived results of training programs for interviewers unless continuous supervision and feedback were provided (e.g., Lamb et al, 2002;Rischke et al, 2011). Only the training program evaluated by Benson and Powell (2015) and a reduced version of it (Lawrie et al, 2021) showed long-lasting results without posttraining components. Outcomes of the current evaluation replicate Benson and Powell's results in the Chilean context using a culturally adapted version of Spanish of the original program.…”

“…The appropriateness of applying Benson and Powell’s (2015) Australian model to a Spanish-speaking context raised questions from a cultural point of view. First, the evaluations demonstrating the model’s effectiveness involved English-speaking cohorts from countries with relatively well-established best practice interviewing cultures and high-resource contexts, such as the United States and Australia (Benson & Powell, 2015; Lawrie et al, 2021; Powell et al, 2016). Hence, it was uncertain whether a training program that had been tested in these highly homogeneous Western-Anglo contexts would work similarly well in a Spanish-speaking Latin American context.…”

The use of a guided peer review assessment for investigative interviewers of child witnesses

“…Participants in the first three cohorts were part of an evaluation of the training program (i.e. all participants that had completed the training up to the time the evaluation was conducted; Lawrie, 2021).…”

“…Learners were trained in a six-module course on best practices in investigative interviewing and they had to meet a criterion level of performance to pass the course. Even though the learners were already practicing interviewers, an evaluation of the training demonstrated that it improved their skills pre-to post-training, including 9-24 months later for a small subsample of trainees (Lawrie et al, 2021). Research shows that peer reviewers must develop the underlying content knowledge before they can effectively evaluate it in others (Lai, 2016).…”