The Effects of Rapport Building on Information Disclosure in Virtual Interviews

Abstract

Rapport building has been identified as an effective tool when interviewing victims and witnesses of events that may be sensitive in nature. The objective of this study was to examine the rapport-building process within a virtual interviewing context. Participants ( N = 94) were shown a sexual education video and then questioned about the content of the video in a live virtual interview using either a rapport (e.g., empathy, personalization, smiling) or no-rapport (e.g., flat tone, no smiling, no personalization) approach. Results showed that perceived rapport was much higher in the rapport condition compared to the no-rapport condition ( d = 1.47). Participants in the rapport condition also provided substantially more dialog ( d = 0.85) and reported more accurate details ( d = 0.42) in the substantive phase of the interview than those in the no-rapport condition. Implications of this study for investigative interviews conducted virtually will be discussed.

Testing a digital self‐interview approach: The virtual memory assistance tool

“…Once again, we looked at four mean comparisons for the quantity of correct details. Both the Rapport and No Rapport conditions from Dion Larivière et al (2022) resulted in a greater quantity of correct details than the conditions in Experiment 2. All four effect sizes were large (No Rapport vs. VMAT; d = .76, No Rapport vs. VFR ; d = .92, Rapport vs. VMAT; d = 1.12, Rapport vs. VFR; d = 1.30).…”

“…We also believe there are several unanswered questions and avenues for future research in this area. For example, for our sexual education stimulus video there was a large difference between the VMAT/VFR and the interviewer‐led approach that contained rapport (reported by Dion Larivière et al, 2022). This difference largely disappeared, however, when comparing against the interviewer‐led condition that did not contain rapport.…”

“…We also wanted to compare the performance of the VMAT against that of Interviewer‐Led approaches (i.e., interviewer‐led face‐to‐face interviews and interviewer‐led virtual interviews). To facilitate this comparison, for our experimental stimuli, we used a mock crime video (Experiment 1 and Experiment 3) and a sexual education video (Experiment 2 and Experiment 4) that have been used in past studies that used an interviewer‐led questioning approach (Dion Larivière et al, 2022; Eastwood et al, 2019). Although not directly comparable, given differences in sample composition, interviewing strategies used across studies, and so forth, these interviewer‐led studies provide approximate effect size benchmarks that will allow us to contextualize the current results.…”

“…When cell sizes were balanced by randomly selecting participants from a cell to reach the sample size for the smallest group (i.e., 27 participants per cell in Experiment 1) the effect sizes were as follows: The effects between the four conditions ranged from small to moderate for the number of words (ds = .03-.68), total details (ds = .04-.39), correct details (ds = .06-.46), and incorrect details (ds = .11-.64).3 The sexual education video was used in a previous study(Dion Larivière et al, 2022). When asked to rate the level of awkwardness of the video content, participants, on average, agreed that the content of the video was awkward to talk about (i.e., >3 on a Likert-type scale from 1-Strongly disagree to 5-Strongly agree).…”

“…3 3 The sexual education video was used in a previous study (Dion Larivière et al, 2022). When asked to rate the level of awkwardness of the video content, participants, on average, agreed that the content of the video was awkward to talk about (i.e., >3 on a Likert‐type scale from 1—Strongly disagree to 5—Strongly agree). …”