Making the most of information‐gathering interviews with children

Abstract

Because child abuse victims are often the only available sources of information about their experiences, extensive efforts have been made to understand how to maximize their informativeness. There is now broad international consensus regarding optimal interview practices, and broad awareness that children's informativeness increases when interviewers conduct developmentally appropriate interviews with children. In this paper, we (1) summarize current understanding of how children remember, retrieve, and communicate information and (2) discuss ways in which children's memory and reporting can be fostered using techniques designed to help children recount past experiences such as the Cognitive Interview, the Narrative Elaboration Technique, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development-Protocol. Communicative success clearly depends on how well children understand their role and how effectively interviewers take advantage of children's competencies and abilities to help them maximize their informativeness. Unfortunately, agreement regarding ways in which interviews should be conducted has not been paralleled by changes in the way interviews are actually conducted in the field and more attention thus needs to be paid to training and implementation. Copyright r 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: interviews with children; child abuse victims; interviewing techniques Reliable information about experienced events can be obtained from children as young as 4 years of age provided interviewers converse with and question them carefully and appropriately, adapting their techniques to accommodate children's needs and capacities. This can be especially important when interviewing alleged child abuse victims because they are often the only sources of information about the crimes in question. This places the children in

Revisiting Narrative Elaboration Training with an Ecologically Relevant Event

“…An important issue is that young children provide relatively little information in free or open-ended recall (Pipe et al, 2006, Powell et al, 2005, and thus, interviewers are forced to obtain the vast majority of the information they seek through the use of more directive questions. Option-posing questions that rely on recognition memory rather than recall are particularly problematic, and of course, more directive questions provide more opportunities for leading, misleading, or suggestive questions (Larsson & Lamb, 2009). The NE technique provides a mechanism for encouraging open-ended recall by children and thus capitalizes on one of their strengths, namely, the accuracy of such recall.…”

“…Memory researchers have shown that such events are remarkably well remembered, even by 3-to 7-year-old children (see Peterson, 2002, for a review). Although young children recall a considerable amount of information about highly salient and unique events, the act of communicating what they recall is more problematic (Larsson & Lamb, 2009). An important issue is that young children provide relatively little information in free or open-ended recall (Pipe et al, 2006, Powell et al, 2005, and thus, interviewers are forced to obtain the vast majority of the information they seek through the use of more directive questions.…”

The influence of social instructions on the effectiveness of a cognitive interview used with very young child witnesses

“…This could have important consequences in a real world context and for professional training. As pointed out by Larsson and Lamb (2009), police officers seem to have trouble to successfully and durably apply the recommendations found in the interview training manuals and lectures, and notably the instructions given to build the rapport with a child (Westcott & Kynan, 2006). Perhaps, informing the judicial practitioners, during training, about the decline in memory quantity associated to the omission of the social instructions, could help them to understand better the interest of using such instructions, and thus, to internalize better what they have learned during their training.…”

False rumors and true belief: Memory processes underlying children’s errant reports of rumored events

“…If rumor can bring about errant beliefs about witnessing events that only were overheard, there is little that forensic interviewers can do to mitigate its effects. In contrast, if reports of rumored occurrences merely are driven by compliance to social pressures, such effects may be reduced by protocols that enhance the retrieval and reporting of information in memory, such as the Revised Cognitive Interview or the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Investigative Interview (see Larsson & Lamb, 2009). The primary aim of the current study, therefore, was to examine the degree to which reports of rumored-but-nonexperienced events occur because children have come to believe they have seen the suggested occurrences, or simply reflect social demands to relay overheard information.…”