Suggestibility of children's memory

Question 1

How are children interviewed? (6)

Answer 1

Many times by different people
Research tries to replicate reality by:
- being based on staged life-like events
- treating children as eye witnesses
- changing stress levels and secrecy requirements
- asking children to recall information after some specific interval
- introducing misinformation and suggestibility

Question 2

What is the problem with research trying to replicate reality? (1)

Answer 2

Concerns about ecological validity

Question 3

What is free recall? (1)

Answer 3

Involves asking the child to tell you everything that they can remember about what happened

Question 4

What is the limitation of free recall? (2)

Answer 4

Children give accurate, but often limited information in free recall, this could be due to motivation or vocabulary

Question 5

What did the Goodman et al, 1990 study investigate and what did they find? (5)

Answer 5

3-5 year olds underwent routine medical procedure

Gave no false information in free recall

Most distressed children gave the most accurate reports

41% made false ID of the nurse

3, 5 and 7 years old showed little intrusion of inaccurate information when asked to free recall about medical examination (Gordon and Follmer, 1994)

Question 6

Which type of questions are asked at an interview with children and give examples (2)

Answer 6

Open-ended
How are you feeling?
What happened next?
Closed
Do you feel scared?
Did they come in?

Question 7

What have researchers found about open questions? (2)

Answer 7

With open questions: (Petersen et al,
1996)
- children shows 91% accuracy about their trip to A&E
- dropped to 45% accuracy with closed questions

Open questions are less effective with pre-schoolers in terms of
amount of information

Consistent effect of open questioning in real life

Question 8

What have studies shown about bias to closed questions in interviews with children? (3)

Answer 8

Overwhelming evidence for decreased accuracy
Fritzley and Lee, 2003:
- 2 yrs biased to ‘yes’
- 4/5 yrs biased to ‘no’
- 3 yrs show developmental transition

Question 9

Who conducted studies on nonsensical questions? (3)

Answer 9

Hughes and Grieve (1980)
Waterman et al (2000, 2001)

Question 10

What did Hughes and Grieve find and what does this show? (3)

Answer 10

Almost all 5 and 7 year olds answered nonsensical questions
25% initially said ‘don’t know’, when asked again almost all offered an answer
Child answering does not imply understanding

Question 11

What did Waterman et al find and what does this show? (3)

Answer 11

When asked a closed, nonsensical question every child offered an answer
When asked an open, nonsensical question, 95% said ‘don’t know’
Need to be cautious about the meaning of a child’s answer

Question 12

Who conducted study on repeated questioning and what did they do (4)

Answer 12

Poole and White, 1991
4, 6 and 8 yr olds witnessed ambiguous events
Half were interviews immediately and 1 week later
And half were only interviewed 1 week later
Each time all question types asked 3 times

Question 13

What did Poole and White, 1991 find about repeated questioning? (3)

Answer 13

Open questions, even when repeated, yield good accuracy
Closed questions, when repeated, younger children likely to change their response both within and across interviews
Increasingly confident about answers

Question 14

What is suggestibility? (2)

Answer 14

Extent to which individuals (either consciously or unconsciously) come to accept and subsequently incorporate post-event information into their memory recollections

Question 15

What are the three types of suggestibility? (3)

Answer 15

Interrogative suggestibility
Misinformation effects
Autosuggestion (reading)

Question 16

Who conducted study on interview bias in suggestibility and what did they do? (2)

Answer 16

Thompson et al
Staged ambiguous event to 5 and 6 year olds

Question 17

What did Thompson et al find about interview bias in suggestibility? (3)

Answer 17

Neutral interview - reports were accurate
Biased interviewer - more errors of commission
When questioned by parents 2 weeks later - children continued to assent to false events suggested by the interviewer

Question 18

Who conducted study on the effect of misinformation in suggestibility and what did they do? (4)

Answer 18

Buck et al
5 year old inoculated by paediatrician
One year later they were all interviewed 4 times
Some interviewers suggested false information in questioning

Question 19

What did Buck et al find about effect of misinformation in suggestibility (2)

Answer 19

Misleading suggestions often incorporated into children’s reports
Also reported non-suggested, inaccurate details

Question 20

What is the implication of misinformation in suggestibility? (4)

Answer 20

Children assent to false information when suggested by the questioning of the interviewer

Rates of assenting to false information rise with each repeated, suggestive interview about false events

Once children begin to assent to, or offer, false information in their accounts, they may continue to embellish their accounts further

New information provided by the child after an initial (free recall) interview is likely to be inaccurate (Salmonand Pipe, 2000

Question 21

Name the hypothesis that can explain the suggestibility effects (5)

Answer 21

The vacant slot hypothesis
The co-existence hypothesis
The demand characteristics (social compliance) hypothesis
The substitution hypothesis
The source monitoring hypothesis

Question 22

What is the vacant slot hypothesis (2)

Answer 22

No memory trace was laid down so suggested information is inserted into the ‘vacant slot’ OR was weakly encoded

But without suggestibility there is 90% accuracy in free recall

Question 23

What is the co-existence hypothesis? (2)

Answer 23

Both accurate and suggested memory are available and recoverable but ‘false’ memory is more recent

Question 24

What is the demand characteristics (social compliance) hypothesis? (1)

Answer 24

The ‘false’ memory is the ‘required’ one (why would an adult try to
trick me?)

Question 25

What is the substitution hypothesis? (1)

Answer 25

Post event information replaces / distorts the original memory

Question 26

What is the source monitoring hypothesis? (2)

Answer 26

Initial and subsequent representations of event exist but child has difficulty identifying source

Even when they can repeal their report, young children maintain
assent to suggestibility and many cannot recall the source of the
suggestion (Poole and Lindsay, 1996).

Question 27

Preschoolers’ ability to produce CSA reports are compromised by what? (3)

Answer 27

Limited memory capacity
Limited language capacity
Limited knowledge about sexual acts

Question 28

What did Leaner (2010) find about reporting child abuse? (1)

Answer 28

Two or three interviews may be needed to enable children to give complete and informative reports

Question 29

What is suggestibility about abuse? (2)

Answer 29

Children are resistant to misleading
questions about significant people

Suggestibility was only in relation to non-central details