FORENSIC INTERVIEWING OF CHILDREN

Catalog description

This course will provide students with a basic understanding of legal issues surrounding child interviewing, and will teach students to obtain more reliable statements from child victims and witnesses. Students will consider children's development of memory, cognition and language, and will learn to structure a child interview according to stages of the child's development. This multi-disciplinary course employs interview methods, supported by research, to acquire more reliable, informative reports from young children. Class assignments will include live interview exercises and presentations of findings to the class. Students will have the opportunity to reconfigure the sentence structure they use in ordinary conversation, and will practice interview methods discussed in class materials, particularly those that increase the amount of narrative information children give during interviews.