The relationship between types of claimed false confession made and the reasons why suspects confess to the police according to the Gudjonsson Confession Questionnaire (GCQ)

The study investigates differences in the factor scores on the revised version of the Gudjonsson Confession Questionnaire (GCQ) according to the type of claimed false confession made to the police during interviewing. The GCQ was factor analysed on 404 prison inmates and six factors emerged from a varimax rotation, which were used to study the perceptions and reactions of 61 inmates who claimed to have made a false confession to the police sometime in their lives. Their false confession was classified in two ways. Firstly, those who claimed to have made a false confession in order to protect somebody else were compared on the GCQ factor scores with those who claimed that they had confessed falsely for other reasons. Secondly, those inmates who claimed that they had made a coerced–compliant type of false confession were compared on the GCQ with those who had made a coerced–internalized false confession. As predicted, significant differences emerged with regard to the GCQ scores. The findings indicate that there is a significant relationship between the type of claimed false confession made and the participants' perceptions of their police interview.