Child Forensic Studies (Psychology and Law)

Structure & Teaching

Year One
You will normally study three units each year, and will begin to explore potential research ideas and research methodologies in your first year.  

Here are the units you will study:

• Child Development and Investigative Interviewing of Children. This unit discusses child development theories including cognitive, emotional, social, and sexual development. It appraises suggestibility in children and provides an overview of the different protocols that can be used to interview children as witnesses/victims.
• Law and Procedures Relating to Children. This unit provides an historical overview of what influenced the changes to the law that have provided the special measures to help children have greater access to the criminal justice process. It also outlines current laws and procedures in England and Wales.
• Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods. This unit introduces experimental and survey-based research methods, as well as quantitative data analysis techniques. It also covers qualitative methods for data collection and analysis, as well as to how to write research reports in both traditions.

Year Two
In your second year you will cover several other applied topics and carry out an independent research project relevant to people with intellectual disabilities.

Here are the units you will study:

• Communication and Investigative Interviewing of People with Intellectual Disabilities. This unit aims to promote communication skills and opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities and outline the status of the law concerning vulnerable adults as witnesses/victims. It aims to provide you with the opportunity to examine issues that arise when people with intellectual disabilities are interviewed as witnesses/victims of crime.
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This unit outlines and discusses the efficacy of cognitive behavioural therapy. You are strongly encouraged to view this course as an introduction to the academic literature on this subject, rather than as training to be a therapist.
• Detecting Deception and Child Perpetrators. This unit discusses verbal and non-verbal methods of detecting deception including Statement Validity Assessment, a technique for assessing the truthfulness of statements based solely on what is spoken by the child. The second part of this unit includes discussion of risk factors, prevention and intervention strategies for children as perpetrators. A summary of research on adolescent violent offenders and adolescent sex offenders is followed by a section on child suspects, criminal responsibility, and false confessions and suggestibility.
• Research Project. The research project requires you to initiate, conduct and report upon an original piece of research. The work is conducted to deadlines agreed with a project supervisor and must include empirical quantitative or qualitative research – data collection and relevant analysis must be included. Any statistical analysis must be both descriptive (e.g. means, standard deviations and graphs and so on) and inferential (i.e. statistical tests).

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