Child Interviewing Practices: Effects of the Implementation of the NICHD Protocol Training in France

In France, training in the NICHD investigative interview protocol was implemented in 2016. Since then, no study has examined the French field practices in interviewing children. The aim of this research was to learn more about the manner in which child victims were interviewed and the effect of the NICHD training. The current study examined 92 real interviews with alleged child victims conducted by 17 French gendarmes trained in the NICHD protocol before and after their training. The quality of these interviews was analyzed based on the number and proportion of questions. The pre-training interviews were of poor quality, containing less than 4% of invitations and 58% of closed and suggestive questions, which are strongly discouraged. On the contrary, the post-training interviews were of better quality: they contained more than seven times as many invitations, twice as many facilitators, and half as many suggestive questions as the pre-training interviews. Invitations accounted for 19% of questions asked, and closed and suggestive questions for 31%. This confirmed that the NICHD training has improved interviewing practices with children. However, directive questions were the most frequent, and the proportion of invitations decreased with time since training. These findings encourage the training of all interviewers in the NICHD protocol and the implementation of effective post-training follow-up to maintain high-quality interviews.