In our book, Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, we devote Chapter 8, Formulating Interview Questions, to the topic of the importance of asking open-ended questions in the investigative Interview (BAI). The chapter contains such sections as:

• Asking an initial open question
• Phrasing open questions
• Eliciting a full response
• Evaluating the response to an open question
• Clarifying the open account
• Asking direct questions
• Asking follow-up questions

In the training manual that we provide to the students who attend our seminar on The Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation we devote several pages to the Cognitive Interview process (which is designed to help enhance the victim and/or witness' memory of the event) as well as the importance of evaluating a witness or victim's account by beginning with a broad, open ended question, such as:

"Pleas tell me everything concerning your injuries."

"Please tell me everything that you did after 6:00 p.m. last night."

Recent research has confirmed the value of these techniques. In a study conducted by Dr. Brent Snook and Kathy Keating of the psychology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland, their results, which will be published later this year in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology, conclude, in part, that "officers interviewing witnesses are potentially reducing the amount of information retrieved by talking too much, asking too many closed-end questions, and failing to adhere to science-based methods for mining memory." The authors furthermore state that "only about 6% of the interviewers' questions were considered open-ended; that is, encouraging a broad range of response beyond a simple yes or no or other narrowly restricted replies. "We estimate that between 20 and 30% of all questions asked should be open-ended," the researchers state.