The influence of disclosure history and body diagrams on children’s reports of inappropriate touching: Evidence from a new analog paradigm.

Abstract

We tested a new paradigm for child eyewitness research that incorporates children's disclosure histories into analog study designs. Mr. Science-Germ Detective creates meaningful touching experiences and varied patterns of preinterview disclosures by convincing children that touching in the laboratory is potentially contaminating (germy). Children (N = 287, 4 to 8 years) heard that Mr. Science could no longer touch children's skin and then participated in an educational program involving 2 attempted touches. A week later, their disclosure histories were determined by a phone call that occurred a day before a forensic-style interview in the laboratory. This interview was delivered in 1 of 2 conditions: with early open-ended and more focused prompts delivered without a diagram (conventional-first condition) or with an initial diagram-assisted phase (diagram-first condition). Results confirmed that the new paradigm produces salient touches and performance patterns across open-ended and more focused questions that mirror well-known findings in eyewitness studies. A diagram made it easier for research assistants to elicit detailed reports of touching, but only among children 5 years and older who had not previously disclosed. Accuracy rates were comparable across interview conditions for early substantive phases but declined among older children when interviewers used diagrams to elicit additional reports late in interviews. These findings demonstrate that disclosure history is an important variable to include in analog study designs and confirm that Germ Detective is a promising paradigm for initial tests of new interviewing strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record

The use of visual aids in forensic interviews with children.

“…As expected, interviewers’ use of visual aids in interviews did not adhere to many evidence-based recommendations and protocols: Visual aids were frequently introduced very early in the interview, most typically around the mid-point, with very few interviews restricting their use to the last stages of the interview. Extant research has typically examined aids when they are introduced following free recall (but see Dickinson & Poole, 2016), and yet we saw that aids were often introduced in the very early stages of children’s interviews in our data. In conjunction with the kinds of questioning strategies that tend to predominate when aids are used, early introduction of aids may influence children’s subsequent reporting by increasing children’s reliance on the interviewer to direct the conversation (Lamb & Brown, 2006) and by increasing the likelihood of brief, inconsistent, and possibly inaccurate responses (Brown & Lamb, 2015).…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of the Global Research Trend in Child Maltreatment

“…Therefore, in this topic, the development of psychology can bring a positive impact on increasing research and intervention [ 40 ]. Our study concludes that child maltreatment has triggered a deep concern among research authors, who performed research in various disciplines, from Government Law [ 41 , 42 ], Social Sciences [ 43 ], Criminology Penology [ 44 ], Neurosciences [ 45 ], to General Internal Medicine [ 46 , 47 , 48 ]. The authors’ keywords co-occurrence analysis has explained the level of concern about this topic.…”

Registered intermediaries’ assessment of children’s communication: An exploration of aims and processes

“…Researchers have found that young children still struggle to understand these body diagrams as representations of self (for example, Lytle, London and Bruck, 2015). Furthermore, interviews with children involving body diagrams produce increased reports of touching (for example, Bruck, Kelley and Poole, 2016; Dickinson and Poole, 2017) and may, with younger children, come at the expense of accuracy (Bruck, Kelley and Poole, 2016).…”