One of the studies found note-taking systematically understated the suggestiveness of the interviews.

Washington State Study

A study of Child Protective Services interviews in Washington found written notes often omitted children's answers as well as interviewers' questions.

Taping captured almost five times as many questions as written notes did. Consequently, taping is much more likely to reveal improper interview technique.

The study was conducted by Lucy Berliner of the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault and Traumatic Stress and Roxanne Lieb of the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. Their report, Child Sexual Abuse Investigations: Testing Documentation Methods, is available here.

Israeli-American Study

A study of Israeli interviewers by United States and Israeli researchers found that written notes of child interviews "misrepresented both the information elicited … and the way [it] was elicited."

Notes often misreported the question that led a child to provide an incriminating detail. Usually the notes portrayed the question as less suggestive than it had actually been.

Notes also omitted 18% of the central details of an account of child abuse.

The researchers concluded that note-taking errors "appear very likely to distort judgments about the extent of interviewer contamination, the accuracy of children's testimony, [and] the severity of the alleged abuse."

The study was conducted by Michael E. Lamb of the (United States) National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and several other researchers. The report of it, "Accuracy of Investigators' Verbatim Notes of Their Forensic Interviews with Alleged Child Abuse Victims," appears at 24 Law and Human Behavior 699-708 (Dec. 2000). The report opens with a review of prior studies that point in the direction of its findings.

Is Near-Verbatim Note-taking Possible?

The Washington state report said that interviewers could learn to take notes that would approach the completeness of tape recording. It mentioned that one of its interviews had been taken by a full-time child interviewer who, in the opinion of the authors, had the skill.

The Washington state study, though, did not involve any interviews which were documented by both taping and written notes. Rather, the study compared tapes of interviews in one part of the state with notes of contemporaneous interviews in a different part of the state.

The Israeli-American study, by contrast, used only interviews which had been documented by both audio taping and written notes. All of its interviewers were youth investigators with long experience taking legally-mandated "verbatim" notes. All knew the interviews in the study were being taped, so sloppiness in note-taking could be discovered.