Cultural Considerations in Forensic Interviewing of Children

Abstract

The field of psychology is currently focused on evidence-based practice and experts have noted that research on ethnic minority individuals are underrepresented in the scientific literature. For example, despite that African Americans constitute 13.1% of the United States population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013), they are not commensurately represented in the literature. Reasons for this disparity have been cited as being due to distrust of the medical/scientific community, poor access to care, poor recruiting strategies, etc. With regard to Asian-Americans, in many studies Asians are not listed as participants (likely because they are categorized as "other") and when they are listed they constitute a small minority of the research samples; studies that are exclusively focused on Asian-Americans are few and far in between. While research on Hispanics is slightly more abundant, this group also remains underrepresented in the literature. This underrepresentation is even more pronounced in the forensic literature. Indeed, with the exception of how demographic factors interplay with risk evaluations, there is little literature on forensic assessment practices with ethnic minority individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)