Technological Solutions Helping to Train Specialists’ Interviewing Skills of Possible Victims and Witnesses

There are different possibilities for how to train interviewing skills of specialists who may interview a possible child or adult victim and witness. Usually, this training involves a theoretical overview of best practices in interviewing following a practical interviewing skills training with feedback in a format of a role play. In role-play usually, an actor or another specialist is portraying a child or adult victim or witness. However, in the case of children, adults can portray them depending on their own knowledge or experiences regarding children. The effect of such one-time training with feedback usually fades away rapidly. Thus, different alternative methods have been proposed in the last 10 years suggesting technical solutions of interviewing avatars to provide solutions for the constant practice of interviewing skills with feedback to ensure that the effect of training lasts longer to achieve and maintain high-quality interviews.

There are different research groups whose main aim is to create and investigate technical solutions for interviewing avatars to enable specialists whose job is to interview the child or adult victims or witnesses to increase the quality of interviews by increasing the proportion of recommended questions (free recall, open-ended questions) in their interviews. The goal of this Research Topic would be to summarize the current situation in the field by asking the research groups to submit papers regarding the current state of their solutions and to focus also on the work to be done in the future to help the specialists working in the criminal justice system or in positions related to this area.

We would be interested in original research and empirical studies as well as brief reports who are doing research in the field of investigative interviewing of child and adult victims and witnesses. We are interested in lab and field experiments as well as research on the process, outcome, and impact of implementing technological solutions aiding to train specialists (law enforcement personnel, teachers, etc.). The topics could involve:

Empirical research on the effect of software or other technical solutions using avatars to train interview skills on the quality of interviews

Empirical research on measuring the process, outcome, and impact of these software or technical solutions

Empirical research should be focused on child and/or adult victims and/or witnesses