Improving Child Interview Skills

The participants were 42 (25 women, 14 men, and three unreported gender) professionals (M_age = 37.1, SD = 7.1) who completed the experiment for a compensation of 2,000 JPY (13 participants were not compensated due to their employer’s regulations prohibiting this). They consisted of clinical psychologists (n = 16), police personnel (n = 8), child guidance office staff (n = 4), hospital workers (n = 4), educational facility workers (n = 3), and others who preferred not to specify their affiliations (n = 7). Twenty-four (57%) had taken training course(s) in child interviewing, and 30 (71%) had experience of interviewing children. They were randomly allocated into either the no intervention (n = 14), the feedback (n = 15) or the modeling group (n = 13). The Research Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Psychology of Meiji Gakuin University (Japan) approved the study (20210031) before the data collection commenced.