Public defence: Aafke Diepeveen

Aafke Diepeveen will defend her PhD degree in Humanities, Cultural and Educational Sciences. The dissertation investigates talk and text in police investigative interviews, focusing in particular on the production and negotiation of the suspect’s statement and its transformation into an official written version in the interview report.

19 Feb

Practical information

  • Date: 19 February 2026
  • Time: 10.00 - 15.00
  • Location: Drammen, Auditorium A5508 og Zoom
  • Download calendar file

    • Link to digital participation.

    Programme

    Kl. 10:00 Trial lecture: Imagine that in ten years’ time conversation analytic research insights have been used to underpin transformations to practice across the Norwegian police service. Which findings have been used (and which have not), how, why, and to what benefit for parties to the criminal justice system?

    Kl. 12:00 Public defence: Talk and text in the police investigative interview: The suspect’s statement in interaction and in writing

    Assessment committee

    • First opponent: Professor Elizabeth Stokoe, London School of Economics and Political Science
    • Second opponent: Associate Professor Hedda Söderlundh, Södertörn University
    • Administrator: Professor Magnus Hontvedt, University of South-Eastern Norway

    Supervisors

    • Principal supervisor: Professor Guro Nore Fløgstad, University of South-Eastern Norway
    • Co-supervisor: Professor Jan Svennevig, University of Agder

    Host of the public defence: Head of Department Jørn Varhaug, University of South-Eastern Norway

Any questions?

Aafke DiepeveenAafke Diepeveen is defending her thesis for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway. 

The doctoral work has been carried out at the Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Science.

You are invited to follow the trial lecture and the public defence.

Summary

In this dissertation, I investigate the way in which the suspect’s statement is produced and negotiated by police investigators and suspects in interaction, and then transformed and documented into a written report. The starting point for the research presented is the observation that the suspect’s official written statement is the result of a process, rather than a static product that is a representation of what has been said in the interview. The data set for the research consists of audio recordings and interview reports from investigative interviews with suspects in a Norwegian police district.

The findings in this dissertation suggest that the suspect’s statement as it is represented in its final written form should be considered the result of a process in which the police is heavily involved, both as an interviewer and as the author of the interview report. In other words, it is the police’s written version of a collaboratively produced statement. While suspects are awarded some agency when they are invited to respond to the police’s summaries of their talk along the way and when they are invited to comment on the text proposed by the police, their ability to assert their right to ‘own’ and retain control over their story is limited in several other ways. Importantly, it is the police investigator who has the right to decide what is or is not relevant to include in the interview report, and what does or does not count as valid or legitimate input during review.

The research done in this dissertation makes several important methodological and empirical contributions. Importantly, by studying both stretches of talk in the original interview and fragments of text that (claim to) represent that talk, I show that the final written statement is the result of a process involving the reformulation of talk in the interview, its ‘translation’ into text, and subsequent negotiations over the form and content of the text during review of the statement. The research contributes to increased understanding of the interactional construction of the suspect’s statement from its beginning in the interview to its final written version in the interview report. Increased insight into what happens in this process forms the basis for discussing the evidential value of interviews and interview reports and its implications for social justice and the rule of law.