Statement Validity Assessment

Stage 1: A Case-File Analysis

The case-file analysis should include information about the child witness (age, cognitive abilities, relationship to the accused person); the nature of the event in question; and previous statements of the child and other parties involved. This gives the SVA expert insight into what may have happened and the issues under dispute. The three subsequent stages focus on these disputed elements.

Stage 2: The Interview

In the interview the child provides his or her own account of the allegation. Interviewing young children is difficult because their descriptions of past events are notably incomplete. Special interview techniques based upon psychological principles have been designed to obtain as much information as possible from interviewees in a free narrative style.

Stage 3: Criteria-Based Content Analysis

Criteria-based content analysis (CBCA) is a systematic analysis of the child's statement (which is transcribed for this purpose). CBCA consists of 19 criteria that are thought to be more frequently present in truthful than in fabricated statements. Examples of these criteria are: unstructured production (whether the information is not provided in a chronological time sequence); contextual embeddings (references to time and space: “He approached me for the first time in the garden during the summer holidays”); descriptions of interactions (statements that interlink at least two actors with each other: “The moment my mother came into the room, he stopped smiling”); and reproduction of speech (speech in its original [Page 870]form: “And then he asked: “Is that your coat?”). These criteria are more likely to occur in truthful statements because it is thought to be cognitively too difficult for liars to fabricate them.

Other criteria are more likely to occur in truthful statements for motivational reasons. Liars cannot take their credibility for granted and are concerned with making a credible impression on the interviewer. Liars are therefore keen to leave out information they believe will sound suspicious. As a result, a truthful statement is more likely to contain information that people may think sounds suspicious, such as spontaneous corrections (corrections made without prompting from the interviewer: “He wore a black jacket, no sorry, it was blue”) and raising doubts about one's own testimony (anticipated objections against the veracity of one's own testimony: “I know this all sounds really odd”).

Stage 4: The Validity Checklist

CBCA scores may be affected by factors other than the veracity of the statement. Stage 4 of the SVA method is to examine whether there are any alternative explanations that may have affected the CBCA scores. The Validity Checklist comprises 11 issues that are thought to possibly affect CBCA scores. One issue is inappropriateness of affect. This refers to whether the affect displayed by the child when being interviewed (usually via nonverbal behavior) is inappropriate for the child's alleged experiences.

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