A Study of the Relationship between Investigators’ Personal Characteristics and Adherence to Interview Best Practices in Training

Abstract

In the past 20 years, guidelines have been developed to help interviewers investigate cases of alleged child sexual abuse (CSA), but few studies have assessed investigators’ abilities to adhere to these guidelines. This study aimed to evaluate whether some investigative interviewers’ personal attributes are related to their performance in a mock investigative interview with a child victim of sexual abuse. Assessment was conducted in a police training context. A total of 24 French Canadian police investigators followed a one-week training program aimed at using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) interview protocol. These investigators performed a mock interview at the end of the training to test their practical competence. They also filled out three questionnaires assessing their cognitive abilities, emotional intelligence, and personality traits. Interview performance was positively related to cognitive abilities, female gender, and the personality trait of Openness to Experience, and negatively related to stress management and level of experience. Four regression models are presented to explain interview performance variance. The results of this study show that some personal characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, gender and experience, affect investigative interviewers’ performance with a child victim of sexual abuse in a police training context.