research

Running head: INVESTIGATIVE INTERVIEWING AND MEMORY 1

Investigative Interviewing and Memory: How Accurate are Interviewers’

Recollections of Investigative Interviews?

Amy Hyman Gregory

Florida International University

INVESTIGATIVE INTERVIEWING & MEMORY 2

Introduction

One of the main goals of an investigative interview is to obtain as much accurate

information as possible from a witness about the event in question. All parties involved in

investigations benefit from acquiring complete and accurate information from witnesses (Fisher,

1995). Investigative interviewers must acquire as much relevant information as possible from a

witness and may need to recall this information at a later stage during an investigation.

Interviewers would therefore benefit from any techniques that may help them to elicit more

accurate information and promote subsequent recall of that information. One such technique may

be note-taking.

Records of investigative interviews with witnesses are crucial when interviewers render

testimony in court. When recording devices (i.e., audio/video) are not available during

interviews, interviewers may rely on other methods to preserve the accuracy of information

elicited during interviews including their memory, notes taken during the interview, and any

subsequent written reports. In cases where interviews are not recorded, the interviewers’ notes

and subsequent reports based on those notes may be the only source of “accurate” information

remaining from the interview. Oftentimes written reports are the only remaining documentation

from interviews; thus, when called to testify an expert witness may read directly from a

summarized report of a witness interview. Therefore, it is necessary to determine how accurate

interviewers’ recollections and written accounts of interviews are in order to ensure the veracity

of their content in court. Since interviewers likely take notes while conducting investigative

interviews these notes may be essential in creating written reports. It is therefore important to

understand the impact of note-taking behavior on the accuracy of interviewer recall and

subsequent written reports from investigative interviews.

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INVESTIGATIVE INTERVIEWING & MEMORY 3

Remembering accurately how information was elicited during an interview may protect

the veracity of subsequent reports and expert testimony; note-taking may be crucial in preserving

the accuracy of interviews. However, research evaluating the accuracy of summarized reports

from investigative interviews based on interviewer notes is scarce; this is puzzling considering

interviewers oftentimes take notes while conducting interviews. Further, little research has been

conducted on how accurately summarized reports reflect what occurred during actual interviews

compared to audio/video recordings.

Remembering the types of questions that were asked to elicit information during an

interview is crucial in that whether a witness answers “yes” to “Didn’t he touch you?” or

spontaneously says “He touched me,” could potentially result in quite different veracity

judgments. In both cases, it is likely that an interviewer would encode, remember, and/or report

the witness information in the same manner: i.e., that the witness said she was touched. As a

result, the interviewer would testify in court accordingly that the witness said she was touched.

Clearly, this can be problematic as the first question is considered suggestive in nature while the

second statement offers information voluntarily. Especially in the case of child witnesses, it is

crucial for the trier of fact to hear how information was elicited in order to assess the witness’s

credibility. Therefore, it is important that question type and phrasing to be properly accounted for

in interviewer reports in order to trace back how information was elicited. Research on witness

interviewing techniques has demonstrated that witness information elicited via open ended

questions is more likely to be accurate than information elicited via specific/closed or yes/no

questions (Fisher, 1995). It is therefore imperative that reports from investigative interviews

include not only information provided by interviewees but also the type and content of questions

asked by the interviewers during the interview to prevent misinterpretation.

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INVESTIGATIVE INTERVIEWING & MEMORY 4

Literature Review

Interviewer Recall

Little research has been conducted on how accurately summarized reports reflect the

questions asked during interviews when compared to audio/video recordings from the interview,

despite numerous studies indicating the importance of question type in eliciting accurate

information during investigative interviews (Fisher, 1995; Fisher & Geiselman, 1992;

Fisher, Geiselman & Raymond, 1987; Schreiber Compo, Hyman Gregory & Fisher; 2012;

Technical Working Group: Eyewitness Evidence, 1999). Warren and Woodall (1999)

investigated how much information interviewers can recall from the questions they asked and the

interviewee’s responses to those questions during witness interviews. Experienced interviewers

conducted videotaped interviews with 3-5-year-old children about an event that occurred in their

pre-school. Interviewers were given a cue question to start the interview, such as, “Tell me about

the time you went with Tracy to play silly doctor (Warren & Woodall, 1999, p. 360),” and were

told to elicit as much information as possible using their usual interviewing techniques.

Immediately following the interview with the child, interviewers participated in an audio-taped

interview with an experimenter. Interviewers were asked to recall everything they could

remember from the interview, to report verbatim the specific types of questions asked to elicit

information, and the child’s verbatim responses to these questions. Interviewers were then asked

to provide a written summary of the content and sequence of the interview with the child in

transcript format. Interviewers’ recollections of the interview were compared to the actual

interviews. Results indicated that a significant amount of information was lost from the actual

interview to the interviewers’ recollections. Interviewers recalled only 22% of the specific

questions they asked and the child’s answers to these questions. However, of specific target

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questions recalled, 94% were recalled accurately by interviewers. In addition, most of the

interviewers believed they had asked predominantly open-ended questions during the interview

when in fact 80% of the questions they asked were specific or closed-ended. It is clear from the

findings of this study that a significant quantity of information is lost between the interview and

subsequent written accounts. Interviewers’ recollections of the interviews are incomplete, and

interviewers seem to have difficulty recalling the types of questions asked and the interviewee

information elicited by these questions. However, information that is reported is very likely to be

accurate.

There are, however, a few limitations to Warren and Woodall’s (1999) study.

Interviewers were asked to write an account of the interview immediately after they had already

reported what occurred verbally to an experimenter, which may have influenced the written

report. Furthermore, interviewers in this study were tested immediately following the interview

with the child. In real life investigative interviews, there are usually many time gaps between

when the witness is interviewed and when a report is generated. The time gap is even larger

between when a report is written and when an interviewer may be called to testify in court. Thus,

time delay is an important factor in subsequent reports based on investigative interviews. Finally,

the authors did not address the impact of note-taking behavior on interviewer recall or written

account generation.

Accuracy of Conversation Recollections

Since question type and sentence structure may influence how information is later

remembered, Bruck, Ceci, and Francoeur (1999) examined mothers’ memories for conversations

with their pre-school aged children in order to determine the impact of sentence structure and

meaning of statements on mothers’ verbatim accounts. In Bruck et al. (1999), mothers

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interviewed their pre-school aged children about a play activity. Immediately following the

interview, mothers were interviewed by an experimenter and asked to report in full detail

everything that was said during the interview in dialogue form. The interviews with the mothers

were transcribed and used to create a recognition test which contained actual passages from the

interview with their child. In some of the passages the structure of sentences was changed but the

gist of the conversation was left intact, while in other passages the gist of the conversation was

changed. The mothers were instructed to look for syntactic and semantic errors in the passages

and to make corrections when necessary. Additionally, the recognition test evaluated how well

the mothers could remember answers provided spontaneously or elicited via specific questions.

The authors’ findings indicate that mothers are not able to recall well how information is

obtained from their children. Overall, mothers in the study only recalled 16% of the questions

they asked during the conversations and had difficulty identifying who introduced the

information into the interview (Bruck et al., 1999). Mothers were unable to accurately recall

whether utterances were offered spontaneously by their child or whether the child offered a one-

word answer based on a specific or even a suggestive question. This can be problematic in legal

settings if only the gist of the interviewee’s account is reported, and the interviewer does not

recognize that the information was elicited through specific or leading questions. Under these

circumstances, it may be hard to evaluate of the quality of a witness’s statement in court. It is

therefore imperative that interview reports include not only accounts provided by interviewees

but also the types of questions and content of the questions asked by interviewers to elicit

information to prevent misinterpretation from occurring. Additionally, interviewers in this study

were mothers who have a close relationship with their children. This situation may be quite

different from actual investigative interviews where children are interviewed by unfamiliar

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individuals about their experiences. Finally, and like Warren and Woodall (1999), this study did

not include note-taking behavior as a variable.

Notes from Investigative Interviews

Remembering accurately the way information was elicited during an interview may

protect the veracity of subsequent reports and expert testimony; note-taking may be crucial in

preserving the accuracy of interviews. Research evaluating the accuracy of summarized reports

from investigative interviews based on interviewer notes is scarce. Only one study addressees the

accuracy of notes written by forensic interviewers from child witness interviewers (Lamb,

Orbach, Sternberg, Hershkowitz, & Horowitz, 2000). The authors obtained contemporaneous

verbatim notes from 20 actual investigative interviews. Contemporaneous notes consisted of

either notes taken during the interview or written shortly after; this was left to the discretion of

the interviewer. Interviewers’ contemporaneous notes were transcribed and typed into an

interview format and were compared to the transcriptions from the audio-taped interviews. The

authors found that 57% of the statements made by the interviewers were not recorded in their

notes, as well as 25% of incident relevant details provided by the children. Errors of commission

were found to be quite rare; however, errors of omission occurred frequently in the study. Thus,

a major problem with interviewers’ notes is that important information may not be included.

Interviewer notes in this study appear to focus solely on interviewee responses; interviewer

utterances are neglected more than half the time. Although written reports based on interviewer

notes were not examined in Lamb et al. (2000), it is likely that written reports based on

interviewers’ notes may not accurately capture the way information was elicited during

interviews, based on the authors’ findings. A substantial amount of information was omitted

from interviewer notes; it is therefore possible that even more information may be lost when

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interviewers do not take notes during interviews and then write a report at a later date. This can

clearly be detrimental to testimony rendered by interviewers or hearsay witnesses who base their

testimony on reviewing reports, in that valuable information about the origin and content of

information may often be unaccounted for.

A limitation of the Lamb et al. (2000) study is that interviewer notes taken during the

interview were not distinguished from those taken shortly after. It is therefore unclear whether

notes taken during the interview differ from those taken shortly after (what the authors meant by

“shortly after” was also not specified). Interviewers did not generate written reports based on

their notes in this study. It is therefore necessary to investigate the impact of note-taking

behavior on interviewer reports. Additionally, note-taking was not varied in this study. In order

to determine whether note-taking may help interviewers preserve accurate interview content,

research on note-taking must first be evaluated.

Note-Taking

Note-taking is usually associated with students in an academic setting; however, note-

taking may be beneficial to individuals in non-academic settings who wish to retain information

for subsequent use. The majority of research on note-taking has generally focused on academic

uses. However, note-taking is quite common in other domains such as legal situations,

counseling sessions, and interviewing (Hartley, 2002) areas which have been under researched in

the note-taking literature. There is a dearth of research on note-taking during investigative

interviews. In some jurisdictions interviewer notes or written reports may be accepted in lieu of

electronic recordings of investigative interviews (Lamb et al., 2000), highlighting the importance

of note-taking behavior in this setting. It is important to determine whether note-taking aids

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subsequent interviewer recall of interview content as the presence of notes during report writing

may aid the memory of investigative interviewers, especially if time delays are present.

Present Study

The present study will add to the literature on investigative interviewing and the accuracy

of subsequent reports based on these interviews. No study to date has examined how accurately

interviewers’ written reports reflect how witness information was elicited. Nor has research

addressed whether note-taking can aid subsequent interviewer recall and assist with generation of

more accurate accounts of witness interviews. Furthermore, adult interviewees will be included

in the present study as prior research has only included interviews with children. Finally, time

delay will be manipulated to determine the effects of delay on the accuracy and completeness of

written reports.

Hypotheses

There are two hypotheses for the present study. First, it is hypothesized that note-takers

will outperform non note-takers in the quantity and quality of information reported. Second, it is

hypothesized that non note-takers in the two-week delay condition will write the least accurate

and least complete reports.

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References

Bruck, M., Ceci, S. J., & Francoeur, E. (1999). The accuracy of mothers’ memories of

conversations with their preschool children. Journal of Experimental Psychology:

Applied, 5(1), 89-106.

Ceci, S. J. & Bruck, M. (1993). Suggestibility of child witnesses: A historical review and

synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 113(3), 403-439.

Fisher, R. P. (1995). Interviewing victims and witnesses of crime. Psychology, Public

Policy, and Law, 1(4), 732-764.

Fisher, R. P., & Geiselman, R. E. (1992). Memory-enhancing techniques for investigative

interviewing: The cognitive interview. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.

Fisher, R. P., Geiselman, R. E., & Raymond, D. (1987). Critical analysis of police

interview techniques. Journal of Police Science and Administration, 15, 177-185.

Hartley, J. (2002). Notetaking in non-academic settings: A review. Applied Cognitive

Psychology, 16, 559-574.

Lamb, M. E., Orbach, Y., Sternberg, K. J., Hershkowitz, I., & Horowitz, D. (2000).

Accuracy of investigators’ verbatim notes of their forensic interviews with child

abuse victims. Law and Human Behavior, 24(6), 699-708.

National Institute of Justice (1999). Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement. (NCJ

Publication No. 178240). Washington, DC.

Schreiber Compo, N., Hyman Gregory, A. & Fisher, R. (2012). Interviewing behaviors in police

investigators: A field study of a current US sample. Psychology, Crime & Law, 18(4),

359-375.

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Warren, A. R. & Woodall, C. E. (1999). The reliability of hearsay testimony: How well do

interviewers recall their interviews with children? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law,

5(2), 355-371.