Appendix I: Interview Protocols

Each interviewer worked from a protocol which outlined the interview procedure to be followed. The interviewers were also instructed to take notes on the protocols. The information is summarised in the protocols.

Structured Interviews

Greet and Rapport -

Explain purpose-

Transfer Control -

Free Report -

Questioning phase - about what the interviewees said during their free report.

Closure

Cognitive Interviews

Essentially these followed the same procedure as the Structured Interviews with the following additions:

Report everything -encourage interviewees to report every detail they can remember, even partial information.

Reinstate Context - Before initiating a free report ask interviewees to think back to the original event and try and have an image of the video in their mind as they described it.

Repeat Report everything instruction ( prior to the questioning phase).

Reinstate Context with image probing - ask interviewees to reinstate context before the questioning phase. Used context reinstatement to probe specific images i.e. "Think about what the car looked like. Can you get a picture of the car in your mind?" before asking specific questions.

Untrained Interviewers

Essentially the untrained group of interviewers followed the same protocol as the Structured interviewers except that they were not instructed to transfer control or give the do not fabricate instruction.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) R000234290. We are grateful to the staff and students of Taunton College, Hampshire. We thank Rebecca Milne for her contribution to the research, Debra Poole, Mona Mantwill and Ron Fisher for comments on earlier drafts and our interviewers for data collection. A portion of this paper was presented at the British Psychological Society Cognitive Section conference in Bristol, September, 1995.

Footnotes

[1] Address for correspondence.

[2] Fisher et al (1987a) document several characteristics of the "standard" police interview among Miami police officers such as constant interruptions when an eyewitness was giving an account, excessive use of question-answer format, and inappropriate sequencing of questions. Interestingly, George (1992) came up with a similar classification of the standard interview based on his analysis of interviews conducted by police officers in England.

[3] We used female interviewers due to practical constraints. We appreciate gender of interview may play an important role but this was not the focus of the current study.

[4] There were no significant differences between the three interviewers in any of the groups.

[5] All interviewers in the present study were asked to warn witnesses not to fabricate responses