When a different perspective and contextual knowledge change the conclusions: Commentary on Baugerud et al. (2020)

Abstract

Summary In this commentary, we raise concerns about potential methodological shortcomings in a recent paper by Baugerud et al. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2020, 34, 654–663, which threaten the validity and the interpretative power of the original authors' conclusions. Our concerns relate to (a) the use of a scoring system that fails to account for how children's legal rights have been implemented in the Norwegian legal system; (b) the failure to acknowledge the legal and ethical rationales behind the use of specific procedures in the Norwegian child interviewing model; (c) the lack of justification based on developmental theory or empirical distributions when creating age groups for statistical comparisons; and (d) the seemingly arbitrary and selective use of outcome variables to support a negative interpretation of the Norwegian interviewing model. Finally, because applied research may directly inform policy decisions, we argue that authors need to be particularly transparent with any potential conflicts of interest and have a low threshold for reporting such.

Portraits in straw: A reply to Melinder et al. (2020)

“…1.2 | Lack of information about the use of facilitators and adherence to the SI model Melinder, Magnusson, Ask, et al (2020) objected to our conclusion that adoption of the SI model has not presaged improvements in the quality of questioning employed by forensic interviewers, claiming that we both misunderstood the principles underlying the model and had categorized questions and utterances arbitrarily and inappropriately. These objections lack merit.…”

“…Melinder, Magnusson, Ask, et al (2020) then go one step further. Not only did they assume the existence of certain interviewer utterances but also incorrectly asserted how those utterances had been miscoded, claiming: “Consequently, the context of how interviewers introduce the topic was not considered and the aforementioned important ethical practices were scored as suggestive information/questions.” (p. 2).…”

“…Melinder, Magnusson, Ask, et al (2020) further argued that the label “preschool” is misleading because our sample included 6‐year‐olds, some of whom might be in school. In fact, only two of the children (less than 1% of the sample) were in school at the time of the interviews studied, making “preschool children” a sufficiently accurate shorthand label.…”

“…In fact, Norwegian law enforcement officers will be obliged to act in accordance with the CRC with respect to children's right to this information, but specific guidelines outlining how children should be informed about the purpose of the interviews in which they are involved have yet to be implemented (Gording-Stang, 2020; Ministry of Justice and Public Security, 2020). Melinder, Magnusson, Ask, et al (2020) then go one step further.…”

“…We recently published a study of extended forensic child interviews in Norway which included a large sample ( n = 207) of interviews with preschool‐aged children (Baugerud et al, 2020). Criticizing the study, Melinder, Magnusson, Ask, et al (2020) make the bold assertion that: “when [the reader adopts] a different perspective and contextual knowledge [it] change the conclusions.” We were curious to read their reinterpretation of our findings but were left disappointed. Melinder et al's comments comprised a mixture of unsupported claims, factual errors, misrepresentations of the study and the Norwegian legal system, and mistaken assumptions about the coding practices we employed.…”