[Judgment of the credibility of rape allegations: a content analytic field experiment]

This study explores the issue of whether allegations of rape can be correctly identified as true or false on the basis of a set of content criteria used successfully in previous studies with respect to children's accounts of sexual abuse. A sample of 30 authentic protocols of police interrogations of women reporting rape were selected for the study. Fifteen cases were classified as false accounts because the complaints eventually confessed to having fabricated their allegations. The remaining cases were classified as true rapes on the basis of medical and other corroborating evidence. A group of experienced police officers (N = 30) judged these cases in terms of their credibility on the basis of the 19 content criteria suggested by Steller & Köhnken (1989) and gave an overall judgment of the true vs. false nature of each statement. A second group of police officers (N = 22) judged the credibility of the statements without reference to these criteria. The findings from a series of discriminant function analyses showed that the set of criteria as a whole is successful in distinguishing between true and false rape allegations. The results of the stepwise discriminant function analyses reveal which criteria in particular contribute to the correct identification of true and false cases. However, the higher percentage of correct classifications in the group using the content criteria was only marginally significant compared to the second group judging the cases without reference to the criteria. Altogether, the findings of this study support the basic tenet of statement analysis that the linguistic features of a statement contain essential clues for assessing its credibility.