Implicit Encouragement: Enhancing Youth Productivity when Recounting a Stressful Experience

Abstract

In recent years, increasing efforts have been focused on testing strategies of improving victimized children's narrative productivity, given that, for many youth, finding out what has happened to them is crucial to intervening and promoting their well-being. Implicit encouragement strategies, such as back channeling by conversational partners, have shown some preliminary promise, but their precise effects on productivity and accuracy have not been adequately examined. In this study, 98 youth, ages 8-14, completed a laboratory-based stressful activity, and a week later, a surprise memory test regarding what happened in the lab activity. Interviewers varied their use of implicit encouragement. Open-ended recall questions asked youth about both factual details and detail about their feelings and thoughts during the laboratory activity. Implicit encouragement increased the amount of both types of details and had no effect on errors. In fact, few youth provided any incorrect information in their recall reports. Neither age nor stress was related to youth's productivity or accuracy, directly or in conjunction with implicit encouragement. Results highlight the value of interviewers using encouraging behaviors when questioning children and adolescents to elicit a range of information about prior stressful experiences. Keywords Children. Adolescents. Memory. Implicit encouragement. Stress In legal settings, statements made by children directly affect investigative decisions and the progression and outcomes of legal cases. This is especially true when the statements are a primary source of evidence of a crime, such as the crime of child sexual abuse, and the completeness and accuracy of children's statements become crucial to the case. The outcome of the case, in turn, has broader implications for protecting victimized children and promoting their long-term well-being.

Child Witness Research and Children’s Rights

“…Saywitz was attuned to the fact that, with many possible biases against children giving testimony in court, it is important for researchers to study how interviewers can help children provide the most accurate testimony possible while bolstering feelings of safety and receptivity between interviewers and children (Saywitz and Camparo 2014a). The study by Quas and Dickerson (2019) fits this approach well. They investigated the effects on children's memory productivity and accuracy of interviewers' backchannel verbal cues indicating that the interviewers were paying attention, thus offering implicit encouragement, while the children were speaking.…”