The suggestibility of Children's Memory - Lecture 2 Flashcards
How many times can a child be interviewed before court appearance?
3.5 to 11 times (McGough, 1993)
What are the 6 ways research tries to replicate reality?
- By being based on staged life-like events
- By treating children as eye witnesses
- By changing stress levels that they are under (Rush et al 2014) and secrecy requirements (Gordon et al, 2014)
- By asking children to recall information after a specific interval
- By interviewing them several times and with different people who they don’t know.
- By introducing misinformation and suggestibility (Bright and Jarrold, 2009)
What concern still remains after these efforts to replicate reality?
Concerns about ecological validity
What are the 5 dependents involved in attempting to make children’s memories accurate?
- Free Recall
- Type of question
- Understanding the question
- Repeated questioning
- Suggestibility
What is free recall?
When a child is asked to tell you everything that they can remember (eg. how was your day?)
What does a good study do? What is an example of a good study?
Replicates reality (or seeks to). An example is Goodman et al's (1990) experiment where 3-5 year olds underwent routine medical procedure which highlighted that they gave no false information in free recall and that most distressed children gave the most accurate reports but 41% made false ID of the nurse.
What did Gordon and Fulmer (1994) reveal?
That 3,5 and 7 year olds showed little intrusion of inaccurate information when asked to free recall about medical examination they had been subjected to.
What are the two types of question that can be asked?
Closed and Open
What did open questions prove about children’s memory?
Children showed 91% accuracy about trip to A + E but that open questions are less effective with pre-schoolers (Geddie et al, 2001) because they give less information.
What did closed questions reveal about children’s memory?
Decreased accuracy, dropped by 45% accuracy (Petersen et al, 1996).
Conflicting findings for direction of bias in 2-5 year olds (eg. do they answer yes more than no - Fritzley and Lee, 2003).
Still high use in UK investigative interviews (Davies et al, 2000).
What are nonsensical questions?
Things like: Is red heavier than yellow? (Try and make sense out of them)
What did Hughes and Grive (1980) reveal?
- Almost all 5+7 year olds answered nonsensical questions.
- 25% initially said ‘I dont know’ but when asked again, almost all answered.
- Child answering doesn’t imply understanding (not a good enough verification).
What did Waterman et al (2000,2001) reveal?
When asked a closed, nonsensical question, every child offered an answer.
When asked an open, nonsensical question, 95% said ‘Don’t know’/’don’t understand’.
Need to be cautious about meaning of child’s answer.
What did Waterman et al, 2001 reveal?
When children were asked a sensible but unanswerable OPEN question (eg. what colour is my car?), they all said ‘don’t know’.
When asked CLOSED question (Is my car green or red), 76% answered (20% of adults did too).
More ‘don’t knows’ when interviewer absent from event.
When asked a closed question, they take it to mean they should know the answer.
Repeated questioning, what did Poole and White (1991) reveal?
4,6 and 8 year olds witnessed ambiguous event.
Half interviewed immediately and 1 week later, other half only interviewed 1 week later.
Each time, all questions were repeated 3 times.
Open questions, even when repeated, yield good accuracy.
Closed questions, when repeated, younger children likely to change their response both within and across multiple interviews.
Sounded increasingly confident about (inaccurate) answers and even embellished them.
