Increasing disclosures of older adult maltreatment: a review of best practices for interviewing older adult eyewitnesses and victims

The current article provides a contemporary review of the best practices for interviewing older adults about crimes they witnessed or experienced. Specifically, we provide a detailed overview of how investigators can use a range of interviewing adaptations and procedures to acquire detailed and accurate maltreatment disclosures from older adults. In addition to discussing well-established investigative interviewing practices (e.g. rapport building, free-recall, cognitive instructions and prompts), this article also summarizes more recent literature on the benefits of multidisciplinary investigations, use of assistive technology and interview accommodations, along with effective practices for working with minority and marginalized older adults. Lastly, several research, professional and policy recommendations are provided for supporting older adults during investigative interviews.

Detecting children's true and false denials of wrongdoing: Effects of question type and base rate knowledge

One common and unfortunately overlooked obstacle to the detection of sexual abuse is non-disclosure by children. Non-disclosure in forensic interviews may be expressed via concealment in response to recall questions or via active denials in response to recognition (e.g., yes/no) questions. In two studies, we evaluated whether adults' ability to discern true and false denials of wrongdoing by children varied as a function of the types of interview question the children were asked. Results suggest that adults are not good at detecting deceptive denials of wrongdoing by children, even when the adults view children narrate their experiences in response to recall questions rather than provide one word answers to recognition questions. In Study 1, adults exhibited a consistent "truth bias," leading them toward believing children, regardless of whether the children's denials were true or false. In Study 2, adults were given base-rate information about the occurrence of true and false denials (50% of each). The information eliminated the adults' truth bias but did not improve their overall detection accuracy, which still hovered near chance. Adults did, however, perceive children's denials as slightly more credible when they emerged in response to recall rather than recognition questions, especially when children were honestly denying wrongdoing. Results suggest the need for caution when evaluating adults' judgments of children's veracity when the children fail to disclose abuse.