Peer Reviewing Child Forensic Interviewers

Do you believe the skills you learn during the training you get when you first start a job or internship are still at their peak after six months? Would you trust a peer or coworker to accurately and impartially assess your skills? What about when your job includes sensitive information and vulnerable populations, such as therapists or forensic interviewers – how important do you think it is to maintain sharp, informed, and best-practice skills on the job?

In child forensic interviewing, even newly trained interviewers evaluate their peers. Child forensic interviewing is a complicated process in which the interviewer is tasked with gathering sensitive evidence, usually involving child sexual abuse. There are typically five phases of the interview:

1.      The opening or introductory phase, where interviewers give an overview of legal procedures.

2.      The episodic memory training portion, where interviewers build mutual trust with the child.

3.      The transitional phase of bringing up the reason the interview is occurring.

4.      The substantive phase, where more detailed questioning of the event occurs.

5.      The closing phase, where the interviewer finishes with lighter topics and completes legal procedures.

Regularly evaluating the performance of child forensic interviewers is critical for maintaining best-practice techniques and benefitting the children they interview. Some places have experts evaluate forensic evaluators, but expert-level evaluations are costly and not time-effective due to the limited number of experts and limited available funding. Therefore, other places have begun instituting peer evaluations. But there are concerns about whether peers, especially recently trained peers, can perform thorough, constructive evaluations.

In "Investigative Interviewers' Peer Feedback on a Child Forensic Interview" Sharman and Danby (2025) conducted two studies comparing feedback of experts to newly trained peer-evaluators. They had all evaluators review a transcript of a fictional interview and then rated the interviewer’s adherence to best practice and provided feedback. Experts identified more deviation from best practices than peer evaluators – peer evaluators had much more positive evaluations of the interviews than experts. However, giving peer evaluators more training resulted in better feedback. Recently trained interviewers who were advised on how to format their feedback were more likely to use the sandwich method – none of the interviewers in the uninformed group formatted their feedback in a positive-negative-positive format. Overall, the difference in amount of positive and negative feedback suggests that more extended training is beneficial for providing more effective feedback.

  Given that child forensic interviewers are extremely important figures in a sensitive situation, it is essential to ensure they are using best practices. The results of these studies suggest that experts are better at evaluating interviewers than peers, but proper training for peer evaluators can help. This research can even pave the way for potential evaluation systems to help ensure that the children undergoing interviews do not suffer additional pain or sadness and receive the help they need.