Law, Child Witnesses

Accuracy and Open-Ended Questioning

Children's memory is not inherently poor. Preschool-aged children are able to remember events that happened as early as 1½ years previously, such as trips to museums (Fivush & Hamond, 1990). Similarly, in studies of eyewitness memory, children are as accurate as adults when responding to open-ended questions, such as “Tell me what happened.” Young children are able to provide a great deal of accurate information and generally do not spontaneously fabricate false details (Poole & White, 1991). While their recall may be no less inaccurate than that of adults, children's responses to open-ended questions do differ from adults in some important aspects. Most notably, children provide fewer details than adults. Pool and White (1991) found that 4-year-olds reported less than a quarter of the accurate details that adults did, while 8-year-olds reported less than half as many. These “errors of omission” may include important details. In real cases of child sexual abuse, this may mean omitting that the abuse even occurred or omitting details that are necessary for the successful prosecution of the case.

Accuracy and Leading Questioning

Because children report less information than adults, interviewers may be tempted to use leading or highly directive questions when interviewing children. Leading questions are framed in a manner presuming that an event occurred. Rather than asking, for example, “What did the man look like?” a leading question may ask, “The man had a beard, didn't he?” When leading questions are accurate, they are not problematic and may even aid children's recall. However, the accuracy of children's recall may come into question when leading questions contain inaccuracies about what events actually occurred.

Do using misleading questions when interviewing children reduce their accuracy? This particular question has been the subject of much debate. Goodman and her associates suggest that in most cases, children do not make “errors of commission” (i.e., claiming something occurred that did not) in response to misleading questions. In one study, children were asked misleading questions about a visit to a trailer where the child interacted with a male stranger. Some of the questions were abuse related (e.g., “He took your clothes off, didn't he?”), while others were not (e.g., “The man had a beard, didn't he?”). Overall, children were quite accurate; among 4-year-olds, 83% of the questions were answered correctly, and among 7-year-olds, 93% were correct. Most errors among both groups were errors of omission rather than errors of commission. Most important, children rarely made commission errors when responding to abuse-related questions (Goodman, Rudy, Bottoms, & Aman, 1990). This study, then, suggests that even in the face of misleading questions, children still may retain good levels of accuracy. However, the interview situation in this study did not resemble many real life legal situations: Children were interviewed and exposed to the misleading information only once. In many cases, child witnesses are interviewed a number of times by parents, social workers, police investigators, lawyers, and, finally, by the courts (Ceci & Friedman, 2000). Interviewers may be operating under the belief that the abuse did occur and thus ask a number of leading (or misleading) questions to this end. Because investigative interviews are more than an isolated series of leading questions, this research paradigm is not the best indicator of the accuracy of real child witnesses in real-life interviews.

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