This project involves two programs of research. The goal of the major program is to develop and assess techniques for enhancing the informativeness of child witnesses and for evaluating the credibility of their accounts. Most studies in the research program are focused on the relationship between interviewer style and the quality of information provided by young children. Several studies have confirmed that open-ended questions elicit longer and more detailed responses than more focused questions, regardless of the number of incidents experienced and the language (English, Swedish, or Hebrew) in which the interview was conducted. We have also shown similarities between the types of questions that are likely to elicit accurate and inaccurate information in analog and forensic conexts, thereby strengthening the generalizability of the results obtained in many laboratory studies. In other studies, we have shown that interviewers can increase the length and richness of children's accounts, regardess of the children's ages, by following SSED-designed protocols designed to probe recall memory and reduce the reliance on more focused questions which are more likely to elicit erroneous information. These interview protocols are being evaluated by investigative agencies in Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Implementation is scheduled to begin in Sweden in 2001. Independent studies in Israel and the USA have shown that use of the NICHD protocol dramatically increases the amount of information retrieved from 4- to 13-year-old alleged victims using open-ended prompts. Such information is more likely to be accurate than information elicted using more focused prompts. The performance of very young children, as well as children who are reluctant to disclose, are currently under closer investigation as these groups were under-represented in prior studies. In other recent studies, we have shown that mental context reinstatement facilitates recall better than physical context reinstatement. These procedures can be implemented nonsuggestively in forensic settings, so these results are potentially important. The goal of the other program of research is to explore the effects of domestic violence on children who were either victims of physical abuse, witnesses of spousal abuse, both victims and witnesses, or neither victims nor witnesses. A group of children were first assessed in 1988/9 when they were between 8 and 12 years of age. The children, their parents, and their teachers were reinterviewed in 1995 and 1996 and analyses of the data are being conducted. Earlier reports illustrated the implications of major discrepancies between reports by different informants concerning both family violence and children's adjustment.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter