Indicating when you do not know the answer: The effect of question format and interviewer knowledge on children's ‘don't know’ responses

Abstract

Children are interviewed in a variety of contexts, for example, in the legal setting and in experimental research. In these situations, it is often very important that children indicate when they do not know the answer to a question, rather than guess. In the present experiment, one hundred and forty-nine 5-to 9-year-olds witnessed a staged event in one of two conditions. The interviewer was either present at the event (knowledgeable interviewer) or absent from the event (uninformed interviewer). Children were then interviewed using yes/no questions and wh-questions. Within each type of question, half were answerable based on the information provided; the other half were not answerable (i.e. the correct answer was 'don't know'). The children performed consistently well with the answerable questions. With the unanswerable questions, there was an effect of format and interviewer knowledge. Children were more likely correctly to indicate that they did not know the answer to an unanswerable wh-question than an unanswerable yes/no question. Also, children were more likely correctly to say 'don't know' to unanswerable questions when the interviewer had been absent from the event.

An Examination of “Don't Know” Responses in Forensic Interviews with Children

“…Similar findings have been obtained in experimental studies (Gee et al, 1999;Waterman et al, 2000Waterman et al, , 2004, probably because option-posing questions are easy to answer and highly conducive to guessing. The unwillingness to say "I don't know" in response to forced choice questions is problematic because these questions often involve interviewers introducing information.…”

“…For example, when interviewers ask children nonsense questions or unanswerable questions (i.e., questions about event details the children have not experienced, and therefore have no correct answers), many children attempt to answer those questions rather than saying "I don't know," even though they lack the required information or the questions do not make sense (Waterman et al, 2000(Waterman et al, , 2001. Although classic studies found that children attempt to answer nearly all unanswerable questions asked of them (Hughes & Grieve, 1980;Pratt, 1990), more recent research has demonstrated that this is particularly true for closed (yes-no) questions, as opposed to more open questions (wh-questions; Gee, Gregory, & Pipe, 1999;Waterman et al, 2000;Waterman, Blades, & Spencer, 2004). In one such study, children answered the large majority of nonsensical closed questions, although they judged 92% of these questions to be "silly questions" during a later session (Waterman et al, 2000).…”

Spanish-speaking children do not always overuse estar

“…That is, when subjects are not sure about what the correct answer is, they tend to respond 'yes' to any question regardless of whether the expected correct response is 'yes' or 'no'. This bias is common in experiments with children (Chien & Wexler, 1990;Schmitt et al, 2004;Waterman, Blades & Spencer, 2004). Therefore, first we provide the means per condition and then we use regression analyses to obtain estimates that are free from the 'yes'-bias phenomenon.…”

The effects of e-simulation interview training on teachers’ use of open-ended questions

“…when the child has not disclosed such information. It is known that children are more suggestible in the face of option-posing as compared to open or direct questions, and when questioned by authority figures rather than peers or those who are naïve about events (Odegard, Cooper, Holliday, & Ceci, 2010;Waterman, Blades, & Spencer, 2004). They are also used to being tested by knowledgeable adults (Poole & Lamb, 1998) and thus may be especially prone to suggestibility effects when questioned by their teachers.…”