Forensic interviewers are routinely advised to instruct children that they should indicate when they do not understand a question. This study examined whether administering the instruction with a practice question may help interviewers identify the means by which individual children signal...

Little is known about the relation between law enforcement interviewing behaviors and commercially sexually exploited children’s (CSEC) reluctance. This study examined the relation between officers’ use of maximization, (references to) expertise, minimization, and support and adolescent CSEC...

This chapter reviews best practice interviewing for legal practitioners and others who work with children. Readers interested in obtaining a copy of the paper should consult the author's researchgate or bepress webpage

Children's memories for their conversations are commonly explored in child abuse cases. In two studies, we examined conversational recall in 154 4- to 9-year-old children's reports of an interaction with a stranger, some of whom were complicit in a transgression and were admonished to keep it a...

Two studies examined 4-7-year-old maltreated children’s “I don’t know” (IDK) responses to wh- questions after receiving various interview instructions. We predicted (H1) children would be less inclined to give IDK responses and more inclined to guess to color/number questions compared to...

When interviewing a child who may have witnessed a crime, the interviewer must ask carefully directed questions in order to elicit a truthful statement from the child. The presented work uses Granger causal analysis to examine and represent child-interviewer interaction dynamics over such an...

The challenges of dealing with the influx of immigrant children at the United States’ borders are profound. Approximately 5,000 to 10,000 unaccompanied children, including many young adolescents, arrive each month at the southwestern border. To determine whether these children will be given...

This study examined 379 4- to 12-year-old children’s answers to any/some and other yes–no questions in forensic interviews about sexual abuse (N = 10,041). Yes–no questions that include the terms any/some (e.g., “Did he say anything?”) often implicitly ask for elaboration when the...

Purpose: The present study examined how children alleging sexual abuse are asked about clothing placement during abusive episodes, both in criminal trials and forensic interviews. The placement of clothing is of great importance, because it facilitates distinguishing abusive touch from...

The present study examined whether a training model that focuses on consistent exposure to protocol procedure, self-evaluation, and intensive peer-review sessions could improve interviewers’ ability to adhere to best practices. Law students (N = 19) interviewed 5- to 10-year-old children on a...