Witnesses’ verbal evaluation of certainty and uncertainty during investigative interviews: relationship with report accuracy

Paulo, R.M, Albuquerque, P.B and Bull, R (2019) 'Witnesses’ verbal evaluation of certainty and uncertainty during investigative interviews: relationship with report accuracy.' Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology. ISSN 0882-0783

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Abstract

The Enhanced Cognitive Interview (CI) is a widely studied method to gather informative and accurate testimonies. Nevertheless, witnesses still commit errors and it can be very valuable to determine which statements are more likely to be accurate or inaccurate. This study examined whether qualitative confidence judgments could be used to evaluate report accuracy in a timesaving manner. Forty-four participants watched a mock robbery video and were interviewed 48hours later with a revised CI. Participants’ recall was categorized as: (1) evaluated with very high confidence (certainties); (2) recalled with low confidence utterances (uncertainties); or (3) recalled with no confidence markers (regular recall). Certainties were more accurate than uncertainties and regular recall. Uncertainties were less accurate than regular recall, thus its exclusion raised participants’ report accuracy. Witnesses were capable of qualitatively distinguish between highly reliable information, fairly reliable information and less reliable information in a timesaving way. Such a distinction can be important for investigative professionals who do not know what happened during the crime and may want to estimate which information is more likely to be correct.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Cognitive Interview, uncertainties, certainties, confidence, accuracy
Divisions:	School of Sciences
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-019-09333-6
Date Deposited:	28 May 2019 14:01
Last Modified:	15 Aug 2021 09:52
URI / Page ID:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/12242

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