Forty-one children (3 to 7 years) were exposed to a staged event and later interviewed by 1 of 41 professional interviewers. All interviews were coded with a detailed, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive coding scheme capturing adult behaviors (leading questions vs. neutral) and child behaviors (acquiescence vs. denial) in a temporally organized manner. Overall, interviewers' use of leading questions did not result in increased acquiescence as previously found. However, one specific type of leading question (i.e., inaccurate misleading) was followed by acquiescence. Lagged sequential analyses showed that it was possible to predict directly from child-to-child behavior, effectively skipping the intervening adult behavior. This result raises questions about the current conceptualization that suggestibility is driven by adult behaviors.

No abstract

We investigated memory qualities that affect judgements of whether a recollection is a personal memory or self‐knowledge. In Experiment 1, college students described three types of childhood experiences: remembered, known but not remembered, and unsure whether remembered or known. After describing the experiences, they rated their memories on several characteristics (e.g. visual detail, emotion). Remembered events were rated as containing more information on almost all the dimensions than the known events (unsure events were rated between the other two types of events). Based on the observed differences, in Experiments 2 and 3 we manipulated remember versus know ratings. Participants described a remember, know, or unsure event. Some then formed a mental image of the event while others did not. Creation and description of a mental image led participants to rate known events closer to remember. The remember/know rating is a source‐monitoring decision based on the quality of the memory. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the current study we examine the influence of child individual differences on children's and adults' behaviours in unstructured forensic interviews. Thirty-eight interviews conducted by actual forensic interviewers with 3-to 7-year-old children were analysed for child reporting behaviours (assent, denial, acquiescence, accurate and inaccurate details, verbosity and cooperation) and adult behaviours (leading vs. neutral questions). Consistent with our predictions, child individual differences that were visible (marked, e.g. sociability) more often predicted child and adult behaviours than those that were not as apparent (unmarked, e.g. source monitoring). In addition to direct influences of the child individual differences on child behaviours, for some variables the influence of the child individual difference was mediated by differential responses by an interviewer (i.e. indirect effects) which then, in turn, influence the child. The ability to examine indirect influences by using unstructured interviews is emphasized.

Despite suggestibility researchers' focus on adult behaviors that distort children's reports, whether behaviors examined in experimental work are used in the field is unknown. The current study presents a mutually exclusive and exhaustive hierarchical coding system that reflects interview questioning behaviors of concern in experimental work. The study examined 80 unstructured interviews conducted by 41 field interviewers with 40 children ages 3 to 7 about known events. Data on the use of leading and neutral questions are presented and include distinctions between accurate and inaccurate suggested information. In addition, analyses show that interviewers are consistent in their style of questioning and that a preinterview measure of interviewers' preference for a qualitative versus a quantitative interviewing style predicted the introduction of novel information into the interview.