Purpose: Recent legal psychological research has highlighted shortcomings in asylum interviews, however, few studies have examined how the interview participants (interviewer, interpreter, and asylum seeker) experience and perceive the interviews. The aim of the current study was to explore experiences of rapport and communication from the perspectives of all the mentioned participants within asylum interviews as well as toinvestigate how well interviewers’ and interpreters’ views align with empirical evidence regarding best-practice interviewing.Design/methodology/approach: Interviewers (n = 62), interpreters (n = 63), and asylum seekers (n = 55) answered an online questionnaire with mainly closed questions about preparation, rapport, interview content, interpretation, and overall experiences of the interviews. Data was explored descriptively. Findings: The views of interviewers and interpreters were mostly aligned with evidence-based interviewing recommendations. However, contrary to recommendations, interpreters reported favoring closed questions over open prompts. Most asylum seekers reported feeling nervous or afraid during the interviews, and three fourths reported difficulties in sharing their experiences and disclosing personal information. This indicatesthat more work on how to build rapport in cross-cultural, interpreter-assisted interviews is needed. The interpreters’ preference for using closed questions presents a risk to interview quality that should be mitigated through training for interpreters as well as improved collaboration between interviewers and interpreters.Originality: To our knowledge, this is the first study to explore experiences of asylum interviews from the perspectives of both interviewers, interpreters and asylum seekers.
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Skrifvars et al. (2024) studied this question.