Understanding Investigative Interviewing

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about investigative interviewing methods, focusing in particular on: (i) differentiating the information gathering and accusatorial approaches by which countries employ them and which techniques for extracting information are used in each; (ii) Meissner and colleagues’ review of investigative interviewing techniques, which established the four dimensions of investigative interviewing; (iii) a discussion of each of the four dimensions of both investigative interviewing methods, differentiating between the information gathering approach and the accusatorial approach; (iv) Méndez’s study looking into how investigative interviewing is performed globally; (v) Méndez’s findings that excessively long interviews and unjustified means, such as torture, are used around the world; (vi) the poor outcomes of torture, particularly focused around the rate of false confessions.

About the lecturer

Dr Cody Porter is a senior lecturer in social psychology in the department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Porter’s research interests are in information elicitation, lie detection and offending behaviour. Some of Dr Porter’s recent publications include ‘Implementing converged security risk management: Drivers, barriers, and facilitators’ (in press) and ‘Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims’ (2022).