Preparing children for cross-examination: do the practice questions matter?

ABSTRACT

Research has shown that a brief intervention involving practice and feedback can help children maintain accuracy when challenged with cross-examination-style questions. To date, however, researchers have prepared children using the same cross-examination challenges that they would encounter during the subsequent cross-examination interview. It is unknown whether the intervention will still be effective when children later face novel cross-examination-style questions. Six- to 11-year-old children (n = 132) took part in a staged memory event, and were then interviewed with analogues of direct-examination (1–2 days later) and cross-examination (6–8 weeks later). One week prior to the cross-examination interview, some children participated in a preparation session, where they were given practice answering cross-examination-style questions about an unrelated topic, and feedback on their responses. For half of these children, the cross-examination-style challenges they encountered during the preparation session were the same as the challenges they subsequently faced during cross-examination; for the others, there was no overlap. Relative to a control group that did not receive the intervention, the preparation session resulted in better performance during cross-examination, regardless of the degree of overlap. These findings are encouraging given that we can never predict the questions that cross-examining lawyers will ask children.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-examination
• children’s testimony
• pre-trial preparation

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge Tim Jowett for statistical advice, and Senior Constable Jeanette Parcell and Senior Constable Ross Greer, who ran the memory events. We also thank the children who participated in this research, along with their parents and teachers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this study was provided by the Marsden Fund Council (from government funding administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand) and by the University of Otago.