Mikaela Magnusson, you received NSfK travel grant 2019 for participating in an international conference arranged by the European Association for Psychology and Law.

Could you please tell us what was your presentation at the conference about?

Of course! My presentation was about our research on techniques for interviewing young children that are currently used during criminal investigations in Norway (the Sequential Interview Model), Sweden and Finland (the NICHD protocol).

We conducted interviews with 83 children between 3 to 5-years-of-age about a staged event with two pirates that took place about one week earlier at their preschools. Half the children were later interviewed with a technique that had a longer introduction phase to build rapport and practice answering questions, similar to the method used in Norway. The other half were interviewed with a shorter introduction phase, following the protocol used in Sweden and Finland.

The majority of children could describe the event with high degrees of accuracy, although we had some difficulties understanding everything the children said because they sometimes drifted off-topic. We found that children interviewed with the longer introduction phase had slightly lower accuracy rate compared to children interviewed with a shorter introduction. Since the children were so young, the longer introduction may have made the children experience fatigue, which could explain why they started to make more errors. Importantly, the Norwegian method also include a scheduled break after the introduction which would help minimize the risks found in the present experiment.

What do you find was the most interesting outcome from the conference?

I got very inspired by hearing about a number of interesting research projects that is currently conducted by other European researchers in my field. I am looking forward to hearing more about their results, which I believe will be of relevance for Nordic settings as well

How would you say your participation at the conference contributes to your future research?

That’s a good question. My participation at the conference made it possible for me to discuss our project with other researchers in my field, which was very interesting. I also got new ideas and insights by listening to all the other interesting presentations. I am therefore very grateful for receiving the opportunity from NSfK to attend the conference, thank you!

Read more about Mikaela’s research at her personal page, University of Gothenburg.