Assignment

Draft: Research Report - OUTLINE

1. Introduction

Every court hearing is incomplete without any eyewitness testimony. An eyewitness testimony refers to an oral or written statement made by a person who witnesses a crime scene. Therefore, an eyewitness is brought to the court of law to provide every detail of the crime witnessed. At times, witnesses are always interviewed first by the policeman to have evidence that can be brought to the courtroom during the hearing. Often, eyewitnesses give account of the crime right from how, why, what happened, and the people involved in it. Therefore, eyewitness testimony proves as the most reliable evidence since it has been proven to be the most convincing.

2. Background/review of the Literature:

Background:

This research study seeks to establish whether the types of eyewitness testimony presented in the court of law can influence the perceptions of guilt or not. It is evident that judges rely on eyewitnesses’ testimonies to make their decisions. So basically, it can be proven to be true through this study, that such testimonies can influence the perception of guilt. Furthermore, there is a close relationship between rate of conviction between the scenarios of no witness and conditions of discredited witness. Notably, witnesses directly influence the outcome of the verdict. The independent variables in the study will be the various types of eyewitness testimony. Basically, there are two types of eyewitness testimony, that is, oral and written testimonies.

Literature review

According to Loftus (2019), the age of the eyewitness is an important factor in determining the performance of identifying the eyewitness. Moreover, gender is also another crucial factor since females are presumed to be better in making accurate eyewitness testimonies (Eysenck, 2020). Intelligence of the eyewitness is considered to determine the validity of the testimony (Glomb, 2021). Additionally, eyewitness condition records highest numbers of convictions (Sheahan et al., 2018)

Flaws of the previous studies

One of the major flaws in the previous studies was that they were full of contradictions. It was established that most information made by the eyewitnesses was disputable. Also, the previous studies failed to evaluate the competence in witness perception.

3. The Current Study

a. Research question- Does the type of eyewitness testimony presented in court influence perceptions of guilt? This study examines if jurors are influenced by evidence by the eyewitness testimonies.

Hypothesis- there is a significant relationship between eyewitness testimony and the jurors’ decisions.

b. The study will use meta-analysis to explore the research question. The study seeks to resolve any form of contradiction established in the previous studies using the meta-analysis study.

References

Eysenck, M. W. (2020). Eyewitness testimony. In Memory (pp. 393-423). Routledge.

Głomb, K. (2021). How to improve eyewitness testimony research: theoretical and methodological concerns about experiments on the impact of emotions on memory performance. Psychological Research, 1-11.

Loftus, E. F. (2019). Eyewitness testimony. Applied cognitive psychology, 33(4), 498-503.

Sheahan, C. L., Pozzulo, J. D., Reed, J. E., & Pica, E. (2018). The role of familiarity with the defendant, type of descriptor discrepancy, and eyewitness age on mock jurors’ perceptions of eyewitness testimony. Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 33(1), 35-44.