Module 4 Assignment 1
Module 4 Overview
In this module, you will evaluate the reliability of the information collected during an interview or an interrogation. The assignments of this module focus on how to present written information in a form that can be defended.
Think about the decision to fire an employee. A firm is concerned about workplace violence and hires you, a professional in the field, to evaluate the risk presented by an employee who is reported to have made a threat. You evaluate the employee, and you form an opinion that the employee is dangerous. On the basis of your professional opinion, the firm fires the employee.
The employee sues the firm, but the firm wins in court because your report was the basis for its decision—the firm relied on an investigation. So the fired employee sues you for slander, saying you unfairly mischaracterized him or her as dangerous. How are you going to defend yourself against this claim?
One way is to ensure that you use methods of assessment that are reliable and valid. The assessment methods must meet the Daubert standard for admission as evidence in court. The Supreme Court used the Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals (1993) decision to clarify the admissibility of scientific testimony.
In the same way, an interrogator must prepare a report, often recommending that a suspect be arrested, jailed, and prosecuted. In other circumstances, an interrogator may write a report concluding that an employee be fired. Interrogators must write reports that are evidence based and inherently consistent and reliable. In this module, you will learn about writing such a report.
Previously, you discussed the limits of reliability for nonverbal behaviors. In this module, you will explore a situation in which you teach others about the potential meanings of some nonverbal cues. As a professional, you will present this information as a hypothesis to be evaluated and not as a definitive conclusion. In this module, you will evaluate the most reliable nonverbal indicators of defensiveness and lying. Then, you will study the limits of those cues in a way that is different from the way you studied the cues earlier. You will evaluate whether these cues have the same meaning if the person is mentally challenged, is underage, or is from a different culture. If you approach the issue of nonverbal cues of deception as a hypothesis to be tested, you will find less and less support for your hypothesis as you move away from the populations in which you developed the signs and indicators.
Reference:
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993).
Describe, explain, and integrate the role differences and outcome differences between psychological interviewing and assessment and interviewing and interrogation in the context of criminal investigations, workplace investigations, and the wide variety of settings in which investigations take place.
Analyze and apply models of and approaches to interrogation and interviewing across the diversity of forensic professional settings, legal situations, and different types of interviewee.
Apply and integrate ethical and legal standards within the practice of interrogation and interviewing with all populations, including special populations such as youth and the aged, vulnerable individuals, victims and family members, and cultural groups.
PLEASE SEE BEHAVIOR OF PSYCHOLOGISTS
Considerations with Special Populations
We may consider an interview process to be like a dance, with give-and-take between the two participants. As with a dance, where how we move affects the performance and behavior of our partners, in an interview, the questions asked as well as the behavior of the interviewer will affect the respondent's response and behavior. This, in turn, will have an effect on the interviewer's follow-up questions as well as nonverbal behavior. Human communication is a complicated, dynamic interaction between two or more participants.
So if we expand the analogy of a dance to special populations, perhaps we can gain a better understanding of the issues involved in the process. Imagine if you were to attend a high school prom and wanted to dance with the students. How well would you fit in? Would your dance steps resemble in any way the students' dance maneuvers?
Dancing is a relatively straightforward behavior and does not involve the complexity of communication. So why would we assume that interviewing an adolescent would require any less skill or understanding than a dance? Not only do juveniles have their own dances, they have their own language as well as their own nonverbal behaviors. Try to remember the time when you were a fifteen-year-old. Do you think that you communicated in the same manner as you do now? And how about your communication with people in a position of authority—would that alter your communication style?
We can also use the same analogy to conceptualize our interviews with other populations, such as with individuals who have developmental disabilities. We can also consider our communications with people from other cultures. Our communication skills affect the way they respond to us, which, in turn, alters our next response.
When we are dealing with people from other cultural groups, we need to consider that the conversation may be as much influenced by our cultural differences as by the content of the discussion. And we should expand our conceptualization of culture to go beyond race and ethnicity. We need to also consider the age, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, and geographic background of an individual. A person who was born and raised in Appalachia is certainly going to have a different communication style than someone born and raised in Manhattan.
Specialized Risk Assessments
As we have seen throughout this program, forensic psychology professionals frequently perform assessments to offer opinions on specific psycholegal questions. The most common type of referral question is competency to stand trial. Other common assessments include:
Criminal responsibility (insanity pleas)
Child custody evaluations
Personal injury evaluations for psychological damages
The type of assessment that we will discuss in this module is risk assessment.
Risk assessments are done to predict whether a person poses a risk to self or to others. For example, if a person is arrested for an embarrassing crime and placed in jail, it is possible that he or she may be suicidal. We would want to assess him or her to see whether he or she poses a risk to self, and this would be for a limited time, such as the following few days or so. At that point, he or she would be reevaluated.
On the other hand, predicting whether a person poses a risk to others is significantly more difficult. For example, sexually violent predator (SVP) laws allow for individuals who have been convicted of sex offenses and identified as SVPs to be evaluated before release from prison. It should be noted that not all sex offenders would meet the criteria for a sexual predator. However, the ones who do meet these criteria are evaluated before they are released from prison once their sentences have been served. If a person is deemed to pose a danger to society, he or she is civilly committed against his or her will for an additional year. Please note that this occurs after the offender has completed his or her prison sentence. The person is reevaluated at the end of the year. If still deemed to be a risk, he or she is held back and assessments are conducted annually.
Assessments can also be offered when an inmate is up for parole or you need to determine his or her suitability for probation versus incarceration. A risk assessment can also be requested when there is a reason to suspect a potential threat, such as when someone threatens others in the workplace.
There are some unique challenges to predicting the future. For example, how far into the future do we need to predict someone's behavior? Will the individual pose a danger in the near future, or is it an indefinite risk? How well can mental health professionals predict someone's behavior in the future?
There is debate in the profession about which approach is the most accurate.
Researchers have developed assessment instruments to assist in the prediction of dangerousness. Many of these instruments are actuarial tools that rate a person's risk on the basis of a variety of factors about the person. However, there is still debate about the reliability and validity of these instruments. They need to be tested on a variety of populations, such as males and females; incarcerated individuals and individuals on probation or parole; diverse cultures; and offenders for different offenses, such as sex offenders and batterers.
The following are some of the assessment instruments to assist in the prediction of dangerousness:
The Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG)
The Historical, Clinical, Risk Management-20 (HCR-20)
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)
The concern regarding predictions of risk or danger is what we do once we determine a risk. The SVP laws allow for people to be civilly committed as a danger to others. The Supreme Court in the Kansas v. Hendricks (1997) case ruled that it is constitutional to civilly commit individuals after they have served their prison sentences if the individuals are judged to be a danger to others. The Court specifically stated that it is not double jeopardy, because the person is not criminally committed, but rather it is civil commitment.
So the question becomes, what if we can predict that someone is a risk to others? Do we incarcerate someone for a crime we think he or she may commit? What if we could have prevented mass killings that have occurred by incapacitating the shooters before they went on their killing spree? We currently have laws that allow us to commit people who we think may commit sex offenses in the future. What if we were to start incapacitating people who we thought might commit a violent crime on the basis of a mental health professional's opinion?
The legal system works on using precedent. Once we have established a precedent, such as civilly committing sex offenders, we could then expand that to detain people we think may commit other crimes.
So what does the future hold in the area of risk assessments? It is very likely that risk assessments will become more sophisticated as we are able to use more actuarial data. The assessments, and thus predictions, will be used by mental health professionals but also by courts and others, such as employers. For example, what if an employer could predict that a person may steal from the company? Should the employer hire that individual? Probably not. Already, employers use integrity tests in the hiring process.
Psychology, as a science, will need to carefully evaluate the criteria used to suggest that future behavior can reliably be predicted.
Reference:
Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346 (1997).
PLEASE SEE APPROACHES TO PREDICTING
Racial Disparities and Our Role
We over-incarcerate minority males, at a disproportionate rate, compared to Caucasian males. Specifically, according to Perry and Bright (2012), African American males represent 50% of the prison population but account for only 6% of the general population. African Americans account for 30% of arrests but make up over half of the prison population according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Clear & Cole, 2009). African American females are also found to be over-incarcerated in this country (Cox, 2012).
Some authors conclude that this over-incarceration is related to the denial of political, educational, economic, and civil rights, which greatly impacts the future of the black community. This trend of racial disparity among incarcerated males is also occurring within Hispanic males (Roettger & Swisher, 2011). Additionally, it is thought that the use of racial profiling could result in such disparities.
While criminologists, police officers, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents often engage in criminal profiling, of which racial profiles are often generated, forensic psychologists have American Psychological Association (APA) ethic considerations to uphold that other disciplines do not. APA ethics empower forensic psychologists to not discriminate when working with clients, which includes refraining from criminal racial profiling. In general, racial disparities may occur on many levels and within many specific areas of practice, which are highlighted in this week's readings. While the effects may be subtle, everyone is charged with remaining neutral and refraining from exhibiting racial biases when interrogating suspects or conducting forensic assessments. Can you think of ways that racial criminal profiling can contribute to ethical violations? How can you reduce over-incarceration of minority males as you evaluate the interrogation process? How might the interrogation process contribute to the over-incarceration of minority males?
References:
Clear, T., & Cole, G. (2009). American corrections (8th ed.). Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth.
Cox, R. (2012). The impact of mass incarceration on the lives of African
American women. Review of Black Political Economist, 39(2), 203–212.
Perry, A. R., & Bright, M. (2012). Fathers and incarceration: Paternal
involvement and child outcomes. African American Social Work
in Public Health, 27(1/2), 187–203. doi: 10.1080/19371918.2011.
629856
Roettger, M., & Swisher, R. (2011). Associations of fathers’ history of
incarceration with sons’ delinquency and arrest among black, white,
and Hispanic males in the United States. American Society of
Criminology, 49(4), 1109–1147. doi: 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00253.x
Conclusion
In this module, we discussed interviewing techniques and working with special populations, such as juveniles, the developmentally disabled, or individuals from different cultures. The interviewer must understand that he or she cannot group all individuals together. Rather, people bring their own backgrounds to the interview. Those backgrounds can be shaped by age, gender, and socioeconomic status, as well as a variety of other factors. Just as the interviewee's behavior and responses are contingent on his or her background, so is the interviewer's behavior.
As interviewers, we need to avoid an ethnocentric position that everyone views the world as we do.
We also looked at the interrogation of special populations and the need to recognize that interrogation and interview techniques need to be tailored to the individual. Just as we have psychometric properties of psychological tests, including normative groups, we also need to consider similar properties for interrogation and interview techniques.
Finally, we looked at the area of risk assessment. Forensic psychology professionals have a long tradition of assessing whether a person poses a threat to self. This is typically a short-term window, such as whether the person is suicidal in the next twenty-four to seventy-two hours. However, risk assessment has been expanded to include whether a person poses a risk to others, and the time frame is considerably longer. This is nowhere more apparent than with the SVP laws and the issue of civil commitment if an offender is deemed to pose a risk to society. This issue poses many challenges, both for psychology and for the criminal justice system.
