Practice narratives enhance children’s memory reports

ABSTRACT

Practicing recall of a non-target event prior to discussing substantive issues is a relatively new recommendation for interviews with child victims and witnesses. Despite evidence of the effectiveness of these practice narratives in obtaining detailed reports from children, specific recommendations about the duration and content of these interviews have yet to be systematically investigated. In the present study, 176 children aged 6–10 years watched a magic show and then participated in an interview that began with a practice narrative, with varying length (2 or 5 minutes) and topics (unique or commonplace), or no practice narrative. Conducting a practice narrative of any kind was beneficial to children's subsequent recall of accurate details over no practice narrative. Benefits to children's accurate recall were observed with as little as 2 minutes of practice and practice narratives were particularly beneficial if a unique, rather than commonplace, experience was targeted for practice recall. The present results confirm previous field research and laboratory findings indicating that the substantive phase of the interview is enhanced by conducting a practice narrative and extends the benefits of practice narratives to even a very brief practice narrative.

KEYWORDS:

• Interviewing
• children
• practice narratives
• investigative
• memory reports

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the EYES Science Camp at the University of Regina, Natalie Therrien, Ryan Fitzgerald, Caitlin Hunter, Nikolina Vracar, Sarah Sangster, Rachelle Jeworski, Kirsten Gullickson, Cori Carey, Sarah Reiser, Jill Price, Kelcie Novak, and Megan Adams Lebell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This child provided 627 details in the substantive phase, which was the most details of any child and 131 details more than the total number of details provided by the second most informative child within the same condition. The average number of total details across all conditions was 211.80 (SD = 120.45). Using Tukey’s (1977) liberal boxplot method, this participant is considered an outlier with respect to the overall group. Using Hoaglin and Iglewicz’s (1987) more conservative approach, this participant is considered an outlier within their own group, but falls just below the upper limit of the overall group.

2. The confederate removing the magic wand served as the main event for another experiment in which the children were asked to identify the confederate in a photo line-up.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS grant to the first author and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant to the second author.