Huang, C.Y., Shen, A.C.T., & Feng, Y.(2014). Interviewing child victims: Evaluating the NICHD training program for practitioners in Taiwan. CIFA 4th Regional Symposium—Visioning the Future of Families: Policy and Practice. Shanghai, China (2014/11/13-15).

Abstract

Interviewing child victims is a challenging task, given children’s cognitive, linguistic and sensory-motor development. Research over the past decades demonstrated that children can be competent informants when interviewed appropriately. Several interview protocols have thus been developed by researchers as well as experts in the field to safeguard best practice for interviewing child victims or witnesses. Among these interview protocols, the protocol developed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) with Lamb, Orbach, Hershkowitz, Esplin and Horowitz (2007) has been supported by the most research evidence and tested in many countries.

Given the lack of systematic training and established protocol when interviewing child victims in Taiwan, the NTU Children and Family Research Center modified and translated the NICHD protocol into Mandarin, and provided training workshops for practitioners to further their knowledge in relevant area and to use the NICHD protocol for their practice.

41 social workers, police officers, and prosecutors participated in the workshop, and 30 (out of the 41) completed the pre- and post-training quiz to evaluate their knowledge improvement. By the end of the workshop, participants filled out the feedback forms to evaluate their satisfaction of the workshop (5 point Likerts scale, with 5 being very satisfied and 1 being very dissatisfied). The results not only indicated that participants improved significantly (paired-sample t-tests, t= 6.326, p< . 001) in their knowledge of interview question types, but they were also satisfied (mean scores: 4.45) with the training, demonstrating encouraging first step in improving the forensic interview practices in Taiwan.