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Abstract
Literature on procedural justice suggests crime victims respond to the quality of treatment received by the police. Investigators who utilize interview techniques that align with tenets of procedural justice may have better overall interactions with victims and elicit better quality investigative information from victims, highlighting the importance of providing sexual assault specific training to police officers and investigators. One barrier to improving interactions are the perceptions police officers have of sexual assault victims. Research is mixed regarding whether training can influence these perceptions, or if training can only change behaviors. However, research regarding sexual assault specific training is limited, particularly for investigators. This study builds upon the current literature by exploring the influence of the receipt of and perceived helpfulness of procedural justice-based training on subsequent utilization of interview techniques that are consistent with the procedural justice perspective, and whether perceptions of victims mediate this relationship. This is tested using secondary analysis of self-report survey data from a sample of Illinois sexual assault investigators (N = 231) utilizing structural equation modeling. Results suggest that procedural justice-based training influences utilization of interview techniques, and that perceptions partially mediate this relationship. Theoretical and policy implications of these findings are discussed.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA) under grant [539002] to the University of Illinois at Chicago to support the Center for Excellence in Homicide and Sexual Assault Investigations. Points of view or opinions contained within this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the State of Illinois, the ICJIA, or the Center for Excellence in Homicide and Sexual Assault Investigations. The authors would like to acknowledge Dennis Rosenbaum, Robert Boehmer, Megan Alderden, Rachel Johnston, William McCarty, Stacy Dewald, Steven Taylor, and Thomas Christoff for assistance with survey development and data collection.
Notes
1. The data would suggest that there are multiple respondents from the same agency, however we are unable to examine potential agency level effects because as a condition of participating in the study, no agency level identifiers were collected – in an effort to ensure anonymity.
2. This assessment was made by comparing data from the FBI’s (2014) estimates of law enforcement in the United States, the national law enforcement census, and the most recent LEMAS (2007). While none of these data sources provides definitive proof, in all key dimensions the sample is generally reflective. We fully acknowledge that this evidence may not fully apply to our sample of specialty investigators, for which there is no research – of which we are aware – that assesses the demography of specialty police units.
3. Bartlett scores were utilized because they provide unbiased estimates of the true underlying factor scores. Interested readers should consult DiStefano, Zhu, and Mindrila (Citation2009) for a full description of the calculation of Bartlett scores.
4. The use of hard skill and soft skills are meant to serve as heuristics only, and are not meant to denote which skills we, or other sexual assault investigators, feel are the best or correct skills needed to investigate sexual assaults.
5. In order to preserve our sample size, we used MCMC multiple imputation procedures to impute missing data on the items that comprise each of the subscales throughout the manuscript. Multiple imputation is a generally accepted statistical process for dealing with missing data in the social sciences, interested readers should consult Allison (Citation2001) for more information. In no case was more than 10% of a variables data missing. Robustness checks, using the imputed and non-imputed data, suggest that the results are substantively similar with both data-sets. The only noted difference was tighter standard errors in the model from the imputed data, to correct for this potential bias we use robust standard errors for all hypothesis testing.
6. We purposefully restrict this to adult victims because investigators may hold different attitudes toward child sexual assault victims (e.g., credibility) than adult victims (see Berliner and Barbieri Citation1984, for review) and approach the investigation and interview differently than with adult victims.
7. Extant research on training measures attitudes with the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (RMA). This study purposely did not use this scale, as other research has concluded issues of social desirability (Page Citation2010), indicating a lack of reliability of responses.
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