ABSTRACT
Interviewers’ work is complex and demanding. To better understand the key cognitive components of interviewing, the authors began a line of research examining the context of investigative interviewing and how interviewers navigate that context. The research incorporated interviews with practitioners, analyses of actual interviews, and controlled experiments using naturalistic stimuli. This chapter synthesizes and presents some of their findings. It presents an overview of their methods, a framework for understanding interviewer decision making, and descriptions of interviewer judgment and decision making across a handful of studies. Within the framework, the chapter presents qualitative data on the cognitive processes interviewers report engaging in (i.e., what they say they do) and quantitative data on some of their judgment and decision-making behaviors (i.e., what the authors observed them doing).
