Feeling heard, respected and emotionally understood: empathic communication in simulated sexual assault interviews with police trainees

Sexual assault survivors often describe the initial police interview as a pivotal moment: respectful, emotionally attuned communication can reduce secondary victimization and support continued engagement with the justice process, while dismissive or poorly timed responses can intensify distress. Yet there is limited fine-grained observational evidence showing how empathic communication is enacted in police interviewing, particularly in training contexts where these skills are still developing. This thesis examines how police officer trainees communicate with sexual assault victims in simulated interviews and how these behaviors are experienced by victim role-players, with the goal of informing victim-centered, trauma-informed interview training. The main study is based on 34 video-recorded scenarios from a basic training program at a U.S. police training institute, in which trainees interviewed professional role-players acting as sexual assault victims across four scripted scenarios (stranger assault, intimate partner sexual violence, assault after meeting at a party, and a male victim assaulted by his boss). Interviews were divided into short interaction segments and coded for (a) Opportunities for empathy (victim cues) and (b) trainee responses: Empathic, Unsuccessful (misattuned or thin empathy), Missed opportunities, and Rejecting responses. After each interview, role-players completed a seven-item evaluation (1-4 scale) of feeling heard, respected, and emotionally understood; the mean score of these items (QMean) served as the main outcome measure. Across 2,763 coded segments, empathic behaviors were relatively common (68%), while Unsuccessful responses (3%), Missed opportunities (6%) and Rejecting responses (0.5%) were less frequent, but still appeared in most interviews. Interviews with more Empathic responses in absolute terms tended to receive higher role-player ratings (r ≈ 0.60), whereas a higher proportion of Unsuccessful responses was moderately associated with lower ratings (r ≈ –0.36). Exploratory coverage analyses indicated that eye contact, as coded here, was not a strong stand-alone predictor of global evaluations, but time spent in eye contact while the victim was speaking was modestly linked to feeling heard and perceiving the trainee as calm and compassionate. A small pilot analysis of trainee narratives suggested that trainees tended to describe good interviewing in terms of being calm, professional and making victims comfortable, with relatively few explicit references to “empathy” or to concrete responses to victim emotions. Overall, trainees in this setting can deliver interviews that are largely empathic and respectful, but that important victim cues are still sometimes missed or handled in thin or poorly attuned ways. The findings support arguments for victim-centered, trauma-informed interviewing and highlight the importance of training approaches that target not only the presence of empathic behaviors, but also their timing, coherence and integration with procedural tasks.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Industrial Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Sun, Tian

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cao, Caroline G.L.

• Empathic communication
• Investigative interviewing
• Trauma-informed policing
• Victim-centered practice
• Sexual assault victims
• law enforcement training
• Behavior coding

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Tian Sun

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132808

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132808