Differential effects of general versus cued invitations on children’s reports of a repeated event episode

ABSTRACT

The ability to describe individual episodes of repeated events (such as ongoing abuse) can enhance children’s testimony and assist the progression of their cases through the legal system. Open-ended prompts have been advocated as a means to assist children in accurately retrieving information about individual episodes. In the current study, two subtypes of open-ended prompts (cued and general invitations) were compared for their effects on five- to nine-year-olds’ (n = 203) reports about individual episodes of a repeated event. Interviews occurred 1–2 weeks after the last of 4 event sessions. Cued invitations assisted children to provide specific details about individual episodes of a repeated event, while general invitations were useful to elicit more broad happenings of the episodes. The accuracy of responses to general invitations was similar for children of all ages up to one week after the event, but at a longer interview delay younger children were less accurate than older children. There were no differences in the accuracy of responses to cued invitations as a function of age or interview delay. Results suggest that interviewers tasked with eliciting accounts of individual episodes from a repeated event, such as ongoing abuse, should consider the differential efficacy of each prompt-type on children’s reports.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• repeated event
• open-ended invitations
• episodic memory
• interviewing

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted for a Ph.D. Research Project by MD. Many thanks to the children and teachers at the participating schools.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Since item and instantiation data showed significant skew and kurtosis, Related-Samples Wilcoxon Signed Rank non-parametric tests were also conducted. Each non-parametric test showed the same pattern of results as the ANOVAs. Given that ANOVA is relatively robust to violations of normality, we report the ANOVA results here for ease of interpretation.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was supported in part by the Australian Research Council under Linkage Grant [LP120200095].