Open-ended initial invitations are particularly helpful in eliciting forensically relevant information from child witnesses

BACKGROUND

Open-ended prompting is an essential tool for interviewers to elicit evidentiary information from children reporting abuse. To date, no research has examined whether different types of open-ended prompts elicit details with differing levels of forensic relevance.

OBJECTIVE

To examine interviewers' use of three open-ended prompt subtypes (initial invitations, breadth prompts, and depth prompts) and compare the forensic relevance of the information elicited by each.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

Transcripts of field interviews conducted by 53 police interviewers with children aged 6- to 16-years alleging abuse were examined.

METHODS

In each transcript, initial invitations, breadth prompts, and depth prompts were identified, and the child's response was parsed into clauses. Clauses were classified according to their forensic relevance: essential to the charge (i.e., a key point of proof or element of the offence), relevant to the offending (i.e., what occurred before, during, or after an incident but not an essential detail), context (i.e., background information), irrelevant to the charge, no information provided, or repeated information already provided earlier.

RESULTS

Interviewers posed fewer initial invitations than breadth and depth prompts, p < .001, ηp2 = 0.58. Initial invitations elicited higher proportions of essential and relevant clauses than breadth and depth prompts; depth prompts further elicited higher proportions of essential clauses than breadth prompts, ps ≤ 0.001. We found few effects of children's age.

CONCLUSIONS

Initial invitations are a particularly useful subtype of open-ended prompt for interviewers to elicit details that are legislatively essential for prosecution of crimes from children of all ages.

Pause for effect: A 10-s interviewer wait time gives children time to respond to open-ended prompts

When researchers and helping professionals interview children about a target event, how long should they tolerate silence before delivering another prompt? In other words, at what point are children so unlikely to begin talking again that continued silence would likely be unproductive? To test the reasonableness of a 10-s wait time guideline during open-ended prompting, we analyzed the wait times of research assistants (N = 7) who interviewed with a 10-s guideline, timed how quickly children responded to prompts, and also timed pauses within children's event narratives. In our sample (105 conversations with children aged 4-8 years), interviewers complied fully with the 10-s rule in the majority of interviews, children often paused for longer than 5 s before beginning to talk about the event or continuing a narrative, and more than 96% of children's pauses that were followed by event information fell within the 10-s window. These findings show that the 10-s wait time was a practical guideline that gave children time to respond without peppering interviews with uncomfortably long pauses. We conclude that adding wait time guidelines to protocols for interviewing children, and augmenting guidelines with wait time training for research assistants and helping professionals, could improve the quality of information obtained from children and advance our understanding of age differences in event memory.