Unique Considerations for Forensic Interviews With Adolescents: An Exploration of Expert Interviewers’ Perspectives

Introduction

When evaluating rates of sexual victimisation across the lifespan, including who is at greatest risk, multiple studies suggest that adolescents, that is, youth roughly between the ages of 13 and 17, comprise one of the age groups most likely to experience such victimisation (Basile et al., 2022; Cotter & Beaupré, 2014). In order to intervene, identify victims, and appropriately direct interventions, it is imperative that the adolescents, like their counterparts in other age groups, are questioned in a way that elicits clear, accurate and comprehensive disclosures about their experiences (Henderson et al., 2021). Unfortunately, and in contrast to knowledge concerning best-practice interviewing techniques for younger children (aged 3–12 years), which is underpinned by a substantial body of high-quality research (Lamb et al., 2018), very limited research has focused on how best to question adolescents (e.g., Dianiska et al., 2024). This dearth in research is significant given not only the sizeable number of potential victims that fall into this age group, but also the unique context of adolescence, including developmental characteristics which are normative of this stage, all of which suggest specialised considerations in forensic interviews are warranted (Wyman et al., 2023). In the current study, we sought to understand the key needs of adolescents in interview settings, and to identify strategies that would be worth examining as effective tools for addressing those needs. To do so, we explored the perspectives of practitioners with expertise in interviewing adolescents about sexual victimisation. Before turning to our research, we explain why adolescents might warrant specialised considerations in interviews and review relevant research on this topic.

To understand adolescents’ needs in forensic interviews, it is first important to consider the hallmark characteristics of adolescent development. Adolescence is characterised by unique neurological architectural changes, as well as significant psychosocial and cognitive advances (e.g., Steinberg & Icenogle, 2019). One of the most striking areas of change concerns how adolescents understand themselves and connect to their surrounding social world (Blakemore & Mills, 2014; Crone & Dahl, 2012). Adolescents often re-navigate their personal identity and relationships; processes that entail gradual increases in independence and autonomy, combined with a shift away from reliance on parental relationships and towards reliance on peers (Meeus, 2011; Sebastian et al., 2008). This normative shift in social dynamics and drive towards independence affects both the behaviours in which adolescents engage and how they share information about these experiences. For instance, adolescents have increasing control over how they spend their time (Lam et al., 2014), and are often attracted to higher risk activities (Steinberg, 2010). At the same time, adolescents’ tendency to tell adults, such as their parents, about these experiences decreases (Lavoie et al., 2019). This decision to withhold information is associated with feelings of enhanced emotional autonomy (Finkenauer et al., 2002), and can even function as an attempt to restore autonomy when it has been threatened or lost (Dietvorst et al., 2018). Thus, adolescents share non-abuse related information in different ways from children.

The way and to whom adolescents disclose experiences of victimisation also follow distinct developmental patterns. In general, adolescents take longer to disclose than do children (Goodman-Brown et al., 2003), and when adolescents do tell, they disclose intentionally, which reflects various underlying cognitive and psychosocial advancements (Manay & Collin-Vézina, 2021), including increased awareness and sensitivity to how they are perceived by others (Kilford et al., 2016). Adolescents also consider the consequences of disclosing in more extensive ways than children, due to the former’s greater awareness of the possible outcomes of reporting (e.g., the intervention of the legal process and child protective services), alongside advancements in hypothetical reasoning abilities, which enable adolescents to make and compare possible outcome states in a more sophisticated way (Amsel & Moshman, 2015; Goodman-Brown et al., 2003). Further, compared to children, who perceive adults as omniscient figures, adolescents are typically more sceptical of adults’ motives, in part due to their advanced capacity to understand the perspective of others and improved reasoning (Fine et al., 2022; Laupa et al., 1995). Such distrust is especially likely when adults are in positions of authority (e.g., law enforcement: Fine et al., 2022) and when adolescents have a history of maltreatment (Hepp et al., 2021). Given that adolescents share experiences of victimisation, and non-abuse related information in different ways than children, it is likely that adolescents’ needs in forensic interviews will also differ.

Limited work has focused on adolescents in forensic interview settings. Instead, research on interviewing has largely focused on interrogations with adolescent suspects. This latter body of work has revealed that, although adolescent suspects are interrogated in similar ways to adults in practice, adolescents exhibit higher interrogative suggestibility and poor comprehension of their rights, both of which necessitate specialised developmental considerations in legal settings (e.g., Cleary & Crane, 2023; Malloy et al., 2014). In contrast to suspect interrogations, there is consensus in the child witness literature, and in the field, that interviewing practices tailored to minors are essential (Lamb et al., 2018). Accordingly, various evidence-based child forensic interviewing protocols have been developed and are widely adopted and used; for example, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) (Klika & Conte, 2017), and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) protocol (Lamb et al., 2018). These protocols, however, lack developmental modifications necessary for adolescents (Wyman et al., 2023); a gap in guidance that is reflective of the broader scarcity of research on the topic. Most forensic interviewing research has focused on children (aged ∼3–10 years) (e.g., Brubacher et al., 2015), and while young adolescents are occasionally included in these studies (e.g., Blasbalg et al., 2021), the research has yet to explore whether adolescents need any specialised interviewing considerations and if so, what those may be.

The limited research specifically on interviewing adolescents yields a few key points. First, adolescents can provide detailed and accurate accounts: when participants are questioned about a simulated crime video or medical examination, adolescents provide more accurate information than children (Chapman & Perry, 1995; Eisen et al., 2007; Jack et al., 2014; Sauerland et al., 2018). However, when questioned about sensitive topics, adolescents may be particularly reluctant to share information. Indeed, when specialist child forensic interviewers were asked about the key challenges in interviews with minors of various age groups (i.e., preschoolers, school-aged children, and adolescents), the challenges identified with adolescent interviewees were confined to motivational issues including reluctance to disclose, concern about consequences of disclosure, and difficulty building rapport (Magnusson et al., 2020). These perceptions are supported by the high levels of reluctance that have recently been documented when adolescents are interviewed about sexual victimisation initiated or facilitated via the internet (Katz, 2013), and in more extreme cases, such as when adolescents are interviewed about suspected commercial sexual exploitation (Henderson et al., 2021; Nogalska et al., 2023). Thus, the results of previous research indicate that it may be adolescents’ willingness to share information, rather than their ability to so, that is important to address through specialised considerations in forensic interviews.

A recent study found support for the need for a tailored approach for interviews with adolescents, at least in remote interview settings. Adolescents engaged in a rapport building stage with the interviewer over an online platform and were then asked about prior negative experiences. Those who had engaged in a specialised rapport building stage that included mutual self-disclosure, in which both the interviewer and interviewee shared personal details about themselves (e.g., explaining what adjectives describe them best and why), were more willing to share personal information than those who experienced traditional rapport building activities (Dianiska et al., 2024). These results, considered with the broader research on the developmental characteristics of adolescence, their disclosure patterns, and the additional (limited) research on adolescents in interviewing settings, all suggest that adolescents require specialised interviewing considerations. What those special considerations are, however, and how interviewers can best meet these needs is not clear.

The current study was conducted to meet this gap and involved a qualitative analysis of interviews with practitioners identified as experts in interviewing suspected adolescent victims. A primary value of qualitative work is its capacity to provide comprehensive insight into a given topic, including detailed understanding of relevant issues and how they may be best addressed (e.g., Jones et al., 2010). Thus, exploring the perspectives and practices of experts is a fruitful starting point for future work. In this study, practitioners with experience in interviewing adolescents took part in semi-structured interviews focused on how they catered their interviews to adolescents, what challenges they encounter, and how they address these challenges. The interviewers’ responses were subjected to qualitative analyses both to identify common themes in responses and highlight important directions for research aimed at developing guidelines to improve interviews with these victims.

Method

Results

Four overarching themes emerged. One concerned how the practitioners perceived interviews with adolescents as distinct from those with children, and three concerned how the practitioners tailored their interviews with adolescents. These themes, along with subthemes within each, are described below and presented in Table 1, which also provides a frequency count for how often each theme (or subtheme) was mentioned across participants.

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Table 1.

Thematic Framework and Frequency Count.

Themes and Subthemes	Count (n)
1. Adolescents can provide elaborate narratives but are often reluctant to disclose	21
2. Respect adolescents’ identity and need for autonomy
Transfer control	20
Be genuine and transparent	18
Adapt language and the environment	11
3. Respect adolescents’ perspective
Show unconditional respect	21
Consider the potential consequences of disclosure	20
4. Adaptations to the preparatory stages
Use ground rules flexibly	10
Pre-empt interview components adolescents may be sceptical of	14
Considerations for narrative practice	17

Discussion

Adolescents, who represent a particularly common victim population and who are developmentally distinct from children, need to be interviewed in a manner that is supportive and facilitates the elicitation of valuable and sensitive information (Wyman et al., 2023). Given that this topic - that is, best-practice interviewing of adolescents - has been largely overlooked in previous research, professionals with expertise questioning adolescents are in a valuable position to provide information directly relevant to this need. The current study was conducted with this in mind. The overriding message from our set of highly skilled practitioners is that motivational issues are a key challenge in interviews with adolescents; at the forefront of the way the expert interviewers approached interviewing adolescents was by connecting with them in a respectful way that catered to their developmental stage. In the following section, we consider the various ways that the expert practitioners mentioned making this connection, linking these ways to empirical literature on adolescent development and forensic interviewing.

The notion that interviews with adolescents are marked by motivational challenges, particularly those tied to many adolescents’ unwillingness to disclose, has been hinted at by a growing body of evidence in recent years. For example, our findings resonate with the primary challenges noted by Swedish practitioners in interviews with adolescents, as reluctance to disclose and difficulty establishing rapport were identified as key challenges (Magnusson et al., 2020). Current best-practice interviewing recommendations build on basic cognitive and mnemonic principles, such as the effect of question phrasing on response completeness and accuracy, and on cognitive and social factors relating to social acquiescence and suggestibility (e.g., Powell & Snow, 2007). In recent years, best-practice recommendations explicitly mention the need to establish rapport with interviewees, and provide appropriate support to improve interviewees’ level of comfort (e.g., Hershkowitz et al., 2014; Hershkowitz & Lamb, 2020). The results of the current study are consistent in suggesting that the need to establish effective rapport and provide support are equally if not more important with adolescents. Yet, what diverges is that the means to build rapport and provide support with adolescents vary from the means suitable for children.

The practitioners’ approach to interviews with adolescents hinged on connecting with them in a way that respected them as autonomous and independent persons. This approach is consistent with research which suggests that adolescence is a period of heightened sensitivity to social signals, especially those relevant to social status (Blakemore & Mills, 2014; Kilford et al., 2016). Adolescents often perceive of themselves as adult-like, increasingly taking responsibility for their actions, and believing that they are autonomous decision makers (Yeager et al., 2018). They respond well to others who endorse those perceptions and are sensitive to behaviours or statements that undermine those perceptions (see Yeager et al., 2018, for a review). With interventions designed to promote positive behaviour change (e.g., healthier eating) in adolescents, for example, campaigns that emphasise adolescents’ potential as actors with agency appear to be particularly effective at inducing change (Bryan et al., 2016, 2019; Vansteenkiste et al., 2004). Conversely, intervention campaigns which focus on delivering content and knowledge (e.g., bullying is harmful to others) often fail to induce change in adolescents, who perceive these messages as challenges to their autonomy, independence, and existing knowledge (Yeager et al., 2015, 2018). Thus, interviewing techniques characterised by respecting adolescents as persons nearing adulthood has considerable potential to establish the rapport necessary to work through motivational challenges.

The expert practitioners identified several specialised support strategies appropriate for adolescents. These included those that afforded adolescents a sense of control, which is aligned with the shift towards autonomy and independence normative in adolescence (e.g., Meeus, 2011). The idea that interviewees need some control is not confined to adolescents, but is an issue that has been considered extensively in the child and adult interviewing literature where it is emphasised that interviewees should have control over the content and flow of information they share about an experienced event, primarily through open-ended questioning (Fisher & Geiselman, 2010; Walsh & Bull, 2010). With adolescents, practitioners’ conceptions of control went beyond flexibility about how to report the event and extended throughout the interview process, with many examples concentrating on activities that occurred prior to the discussion of allegation (e.g., whether the adolescent would like to engage in narrative practice) and even prior to the interview itself (e.g., eliciting preferences about scheduling or interviewer gender). In addition to eliciting adolescents’ preferences to instil a sense of control, practitioners considered that adolescents have a stronger sense of control when they know what to expect, and thus benefit from detailed explanations about the process. Given that sexual victimisation violates one’s sense of control, and adolescents are known to withhold information in attempt to restore autonomy that has been lost (Dietvorst et al., 2018; Ullman & Peter-Hagene, 2014), an interviewing approach that maximises adolescents’ experience of control is promising. Future research could build on the viewpoints expressed in this study by experimentally exploring whether adolescents benefit from the inclusion of explanations which are more akin to those typically provided to adults (Snook et al., 2014; Walsh & Bull, 2010), as well as practices which give adolescents the opportunity to exercise autonomy during the entire interview process. These strategies are likely to be particularly important for adolescents, though other interviewees, such as children and adults, who have experienced victimisation, may also benefit from these considerations.

Being genuine and transparent was another principle underlying how the practitioners supported adolescents during the interview. Compared to children, adolescents are more adept at abstract reasoning, have enhanced capacity to understand the perspectives of others, and are more likely to question adults’ authority (Fine et al., 2022; Laupa et al., 1995). These factors make adolescents, especially those with a history of maltreatment (e.g., Hepp et al., 2021), prone to scepticism concerning adults’ motives. In the context of forensic interviews wherein adolescents are considering their decision to disclose, interviewers need to earn adolescents’ trust. How can interviewers build trust? The results of this study suggest that practices which demonstrate the genuineness and transparency of the interviewer are likely quite promising. Complementing the perspectives of practitioners, results of a recent study suggests that interviewer transparency, made salient through mutual self-disclosure during the rapport building phase, can enhance adolescents’ later willingness to share details of prior negative experiences in remote interview settings (Dianiska et al., 2024). By sharing personal details, interviewers appear to signal that they trust the adolescent as recipients of personal information, prompting the adolescent to do the same later. As the practitioners here suggested, approaches that enhance perceptions of genuineness, transparency, and mutual respect may have similar potential to improve adolescents’ trust and hence willingness to share information. These possibilities could be systematically examined, directly and in conjunction with the type of mutual disclosure employed by Dianiska et al. (2024) to ascertain which exerts the most powerful positive effect on adolescents’ reporting.

As alluded to above, a sizeable number of the recommendations focused on the preparatory stages of the interview. The practitioners described several common preparatory activities with children (i.e., ground rules and narrative practice activities), which they believed could be effective with adolescents with modification. The effects of preparatory activities on children, who are accustomed to adults guiding their responses and perceive them as knowledgeable interaction partners, have been documented (Fivush, 2011; Roberts et al., 2011). For adolescents, the primary benefit of these activities may be in building trust rather than setting expectations for the interview dynamics (Dianiska et al., 2024), Without modification (e.g., explanations about why these activities are needed), activities formulated for children (e.g., ground rules such as ‘you should tell me if you don’t understand’), are likely to appear authoritative or childish to adolescents, potentially hindering rapport and heightening resistance (Brehm, 1966; Miron & Brehm, 2006). It is notable that the practitioners modified the preparatory activities to facilitate connection and flow of the interview, and to respect the adolescents’ maturity. For example, they avoided practising ground rules, and explained why certain questions had to be asked when the answers seemed obvious. Future research should prioritise exploring different explanatory approaches to maximise their potential to establish effective rapport in the early stages of the interview.