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33 J. Quantitative Criminology 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/jquantc33 and id is 1 raw text is: J Quant Criminol (2017) 33:1-19
DOI 10.1007/s10940-015-9273-6                                           CrossMark
The Role of Site Variance in the American Judicature
Society Field Study Comparing Simultaneous
and Sequential Lineups
Karen L. Amendolai - John T. Wixted2
Published online: 17 December 2015
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract
Objectives Police departments often use photo lineups for eyewitness identification
purposes. A widely adopted lineup reform designed to reduce eyewitness misidentifications
involves switching from the standard simultaneous photo presentation format to a se-
quential format. These two lineup procedures were recently tested in the American Judi-
cature Society (AJS) field study, which was conducted in four different police jurisdictions.
The results from two phases of that investigation reached opposite conclusions as to which
lineup procedure is superior, and the purpose of our current investigation was to elucidate
the role of site variance in shaping those contrasting conclusions.
Methods In previous analyses, the field study data were either (1) aggregated across all
four study sites or (2) drawn from only one study site (Austin, Texas). Here, we analyze the
data separately for the Austin study site, where 69 % of the eyewitnesses were tested, and
the other three study sites combined, where 31 % of the eyewitnesses were tested.
Results The results indicate significant site variance between the Austin and non-Austin
study sites. In addition, the results suggest that aggregating the data across sites played a
determinative role in creating the apparent disagreement about which lineup procedure is
diagnostically superior.
Conclusions Once large differences across the AJS study sites are taken into consid-
eration, there is no longer any disagreement about which lineup procedure is superior. The
simultaneous procedure is diagnostically superior to the sequential procedure, but the
sequential procedure sometimes induces more conservative responding (a result that can
and often does masquerade as diagnostic superiority).
® Karen L. Amendola
kamendola@policefoundation.org
® John T. Wixted
jwixted@ucsd.edu
Police Foundation, 1201 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC 20036-2636, USA
2  Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA

Springer

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