Investigative Interviewing for Investigators: The Science-Based Era
- C. Edward
- Apr 29, 2023
- 9 min read
Updated: Aug 10
Investigative interviewing plays a central role in the pursuit of accurate information, sound investigative decisions, and ultimately, the truth. Whether the investigation involves a homicide, workplace complaint, fraud allegation, internal investigation, or routine patrol call, much of what investigators eventually know begins with a conversation.
During its landmark study of criminal investigation practices, the RAND Corporation identified interviews as a primary method for developing case information, including identifying suspects, clarifying timelines, resolving conflicting accounts, and locating additional evidence. While much of that early research examined investigative practices of its era, the fundamental point remains relevant today.
Patrol officers are often the first investigative interviewers in a case. Detectives, corporate investigators, human resources professionals, compliance personnel, and internal investigators continue that process as the investigation develops.
Investigative interviewing is one of the primary engines of information gathering in an investigation.
Through adaptable, evidence-based conversations, investigators transform verbal accounts into actionable case information. Two communication skills sit at the center of effective investigative interviewing: rapport building and active listening.
Used correctly, both can increase cooperation, encourage more complete accounts, and uncover information that might otherwise remain undisclosed.
Investigative Interviewing Can Determine Case Outcomes
Every investigation depends on the quality of the information collected.
Physical, digital, documentary, and forensic evidence are critical, but those forms of evidence rarely tell the entire story by themselves. Statements connect people, places, decisions, actions, timelines, and events.
Investigative interviews can reveal perceptions, explanations, motives, contradictions, relationships, and previously unknown information that physical evidence alone cannot provide.
When investigative interviewing is performed effectively, interviews can:
Generate new investigative leads
Identify additional witnesses and evidence
Clarify timelines and sequences of events
Establish or challenge elements of an allegation
Test competing explanations
Reveal inconsistencies requiring further investigation
When interviewing is performed poorly, the opposite can occur. Investigators can contaminate memory, introduce information into an account, reinforce their own assumptions, miss important disclosures, or unintentionally narrow the investigation around an incorrect theory.
Investigative interviewing goes far beyond recording what someone says. A well-structured interview can actively discover evidence.
Interviews often become the critical mechanism for corroborating or disproving pivotal information long before laboratory testing, digital analysis, or other investigative processes are complete.
Information is the foundation of criminal, administrative, and corporate investigations. Charges, disciplinary decisions, investigative conclusions, employment actions, prosecutions, and reputations may eventually depend on the reliability of statement evidence.
That makes interviewing quality more than a communication issue.
It is an evidence issue.
What Is Science-Based Investigative Interviewing?
Science-Based Interviewing is the adaptable application of psychological and communication research to investigative interviewing and information-gathering conversations.
Rather than relying on intuition, pressure, behavioral guesswork, or confrontation, Science-Based Interviewing (SBI) uses strategies informed by research into memory, rapport, questioning, evidence disclosure, communication, and human decision-making.
The goal is not simply to obtain an admission or confession.
The goal is to gather more complete, accurate, reliable, and verifiable information.
That difference creates an entirely different investigative mindset and is an upgrade in interviewing from outdated legacy techniques.
A confession-focused interviewer can begin looking for the shortest path to an admission.
An information-focused interviewer wants to understand what happened, what the person knows, how they know it, what can be independently verified, what remains unexplained, and what new investigative avenues emerge from the account.
Investigative interviewing should expand what investigators know, not simply confirm what they already believe.
This is particularly important because human memory is reconstructive and vulnerable to suggestion, contamination, expectations, and poorly structured questioning.
Good investigative interviewing supports recall.
Poor interviewing can contaminate it.
Rapport Building Is an Investigative Tool
Rapport is the foundation on which productive investigative communication is built.
In investigative settings, rapport involves creating the interpersonal conditions that encourage communication, cooperation, and continued disclosure. Establishing rapport should not be treated as a brief introductory phase that ends once substantive questioning begins.
Rapport needs to continue throughout the interview.
This is important because investigative interviewing frequently requires people to discuss uncomfortable, embarrassing, traumatic, incriminating, or personally consequential information. Rapport is the factor that increases the amount of information obtained in an interview.
An interviewee who feels judged, threatened, ignored, or prematurely accused has reasons to restrict communication. An interviewee who perceives the interviewer as attentive, professional, fair, and interested in hearing the complete account has more reasons to continue talking. Field studies in law enforcement agencies in multiple states confirm this: legacy tactics decrease information yield and cooperation, while science-based interviewing methods increase cooperation, information disclosure, and even admissions and confessions (Russano et al., 2024; Russano et al., 2026). The choice in interviewing is clear.
The Core Investigative Question: More Information or Less?
Much of the debate surrounding investigative interviewing can be reduced to a surprisingly simple question: Do you want more case information or less?
Rapport-based interviewing is designed to keep communication moving.
Confrontation, judgment, repeated interruption, premature accusations, and coercive pressure can move the conversation in the opposite direction. They may produce short answers, compliance, resistance, or agreement without necessarily producing a complete and reliable account.
The objective of investigative interviewing should not be to make someone talk.
It should be to create conditions in which they provide useful information.
More detail creates more opportunities for corroboration.
More narrative creates more investigative leads.
More information provides investigators with more opportunities to determine what is accurate, what is inconsistent, and what requires additional investigation.
Rapport Wins Where Pressure Can Fail
Rapport is sometimes mischaracterized as a "soft" interviewing technique.
That misunderstands its purpose.
Rapport is an operational information-gathering tool used in some of the highest-stakes interviewing environments imaginable, including national security investigations, homicide investigations, sexual assault cases, violent crime investigations, and suspect interviews.
The reason is straightforward.
Investigators cannot obtain information that someone chooses not to provide.
Research continues to demonstrate the importance of rapport in overcoming resistance and increasing disclosure. Research examining similarity and rapport tactics has also found improvements in perceptions of rapport and increases in the quantity and quality of information disclosed.
For investigators, the practical lesson is important: Rapport is not about being nice. It is about being effective.
If your job depends on gathering information from people, learning how to establish and maintain rapport should be considered an investigative competency.
Active Listening Turns Conversation Into Investigative Information
Active listening is another essential component of Science-Based Interviewing and effective investigative interviewing.
Active listening requires more than simply remaining quiet while another person speaks. The interviewer must attend to the speaker, understand the meaning of what is being communicated, identify information requiring clarification, and respond in ways that encourage continued disclosure.
In investigative interviewing, active listening can help an interviewer:
Encourage a free narrative
Clarify vague or incomplete statements
Explore important details
Identify investigative leads
Recognize changes or inconsistencies in an account
Reduce unnecessary interruption
Demonstrate attention and professionalism
Encourage the interviewee to elaborate
Identify information requiring corroboration
The interviewer remains active throughout the process, but does not and should not dominate the conversation.
An investigator who talks most of the time may feel highly involved in the interview while simultaneously reducing the amount of information available from the person who actually possesses it.
Instead of immediately correcting, challenging, or confronting discrepancies, Science-Based Interviewing encourages investigators to first understand the account.
Gather.
Clarify.
Explore.
Then evaluate.
Do you want more case information or less?
Rapport and Active Listening Work Together
Rapport and active listening should not be viewed as separate tricks pulled from an interviewer's toolbox.
They reinforce one another.
Rapport encourages communication. Active listening demonstrates that the communication is being heard and gives the interviewer tools to keep the narrative moving.
Together, they help create interviews that are more likely to produce detailed accounts, meaningful clarification, continued cooperation, and information capable of being independently evaluated.
This is particularly important when interviewing resistant subjects.
Investigators do not need to agree with the person they are interviewing. They do not need to approve of the person's behavior. They do not need to surrender control of the investigative process.
They need to keep information moving.
Why Investigative Interviewing Must Move Beyond Legacy Interrogation
Conventional interrogation models have often relied on assumptions about deception, criminal behavior, guilt, and confessions that have not held up well under scientific examination.
One of the clearest examples involves behavioral lie detection.
Research has repeatedly demonstrated that people are poor human lie detectors. Meta-analytic research places average deception-detection performance at approximately 54% accuracy.
That is barely better than chance.
Yet behavioral assumptions can influence investigators to decide who is deceptive, become increasingly confident in an early theory, ask confirmatory questions, interpret ambiguous information as incriminating, and prematurely shift from investigation into accusation.
Those are not simply interviewing problems.
They are investigative risks.
Coercive and highly accusatory methods can also contribute to false confessions, memory contamination, false case information, and biased investigative decision-making.
The problem becomes especially serious when an interviewer begins with the assumption that the person is guilty.
Once that happens, investigative interviewing can quietly become an exercise in proving the investigator's original theory rather than testing it.
Science-Based Interviewing offers a different path.
Investigative Interviewing Should Test Information, Not Confirm Assumptions
Science-Based Interviewing replaces folklore-based tactics with methods supported by laboratory research, field research, and real-world application.
These include memory-compatible interviewing strategies, rapport, active listening, productive questioning, free narratives, careful interview planning, strategic questioning, bias mitigation, and the purposeful disclosure of evidence.
Each supports the same fundamental goal:
Gather the maximum amount of reliable information before deciding what that information means.
This is also why evidence should not simply be thrown onto the table at the first opportunity.
Evidence has investigative value.
What does the person say before knowing what investigators know?
What details can be independently verified?
What information is consistent with the evidence?
What information conflicts with it?
What explanation does the interviewee provide?
What new information does that explanation generate?
Used strategically, evidence becomes more than something investigators reveal.
It becomes a method for evaluating an account.
The result is not a softer investigation.
It is a stronger and more defensible investigation.
Investigative Interviewing Is Not Just for Police
Although investigative interviewing is frequently associated with law enforcement, the same principles apply anywhere professionals must determine what happened based partly on information obtained from people.
Corporate investigators, human resources professionals, compliance investigators, insurance investigators, auditors, attorneys, internal affairs personnel, and corporate security teams all conduct information-gathering interviews that can affect significant organizational decisions.
The setting may change...
The informational challenge does not.
A workplace investigator needs accurate accounts.
A homicide detective needs accurate accounts.
A compliance investigator needs accurate accounts.
An internal investigator needs accurate accounts.
Across each environment, the fundamental objectives remain remarkably similar:
Gather accurate information, reduce uncertainty, test competing explanations, corroborate what can be corroborated, make better decisions, and don't rely on junk science.
This is why corporate investigations can benefit from many of the same research-supported interviewing principles that improve criminal investigations.
Better Investigative Interviewing Produces Better Investigations
Science-based investigative interviewing represents a shift from a legacy interrogation definition as a contest toward interviewing as a disciplined information-gathering process whether speaking with a victim, reporting party, witness, outcry witness, focus, or suspect.
Effective investigators do not need tricks.
They need better information.
They need methods that encourage complete accounts, reduce contamination, challenge assumptions, improve cooperation, and create opportunities for independent verification.
Rapport and active listening are central to that process, but they are part of a larger investigative philosophy built around information rather than confession.
When investigators gather more reliable information, they have more material to corroborate.
When they have more information to corroborate, they can test competing explanations more effectively.
When they test competing explanations rather than simply confirming an initial theory, they reduce investigative error.
And when investigative decisions are grounded in reliable information rather than assumptions, the entire investigation becomes stronger.
Whether the setting is law enforcement, corporate investigations, human resources, compliance, or internal investigations, the choice remains the same:
Use interviewing methods that restrict information, or use Science-Based Interviewing to learn more, test more, and make better investigative decisions.
Better interviews produce better information.
Better information produces better investigations.
Investigative Interviewing References
Bond, C. F., & DePaulo, B. M. (2008). Individual differences in judging deception: Accuracy and bias. Psychological Bulletin, 134(4), 477–492.
Dianiska, R. E., Swanner, J. K., Brimbal, L., & Meissner, C. A. (2021). Using disclosure, common ground, and verification to build rapport and elicit information. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law: An Official Law Review of the University of Arizona College of Law and the University of Miami School of Law, 27(3), 341–353.
Kelly, C. E., & Redlich, A. D. (2025). The changing landscape of police interviewing and interrogation. Annual Review of Criminology.
Russano, M. B., Meissner, C. A., Atkinson, D. J., Brandon, S. E., Wells, S., Kleinman, S. M., Ray, D. G., & Jones, M. S. (2024). Evaluating the effectiveness of a 5-day training on science-based methods of interrogation with U.S. federal, state, and local law enforcement investigators. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 30(2), 105–120.
Russano, M. B., Meissner, C. A., Jones, M. S., Rothweiler, J. N., Taylor, P. J., Cory, C., & Brandon, S. E. (2026). Evaluating the effectiveness of a practitioner-designed science-based interviewing and interrogation course: A collaborative training and research effort. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 31, 273–300.
Comments