Interviewing autistic adults: Adaptations to support recall in police, employment, and healthcare interviews

Abstract

Recalling specific past experiences is critical for most formal social interactions, including when being interviewed for employment, as a witness or defendant in the criminal justice system, or as a patient during a clinical consultation. Such interviews can be difficult for autistic adults under standard open questioning, yet applied research into effective methods to facilitate autistic adults’ recall is only recently beginning to emerge. The current study tested the efficacy of different prompting techniques to support autistic adults’ recall of specific personal memories; 30 autistic and 30 typically developing adults (intelligence quotients > 85) were asked to recall specific instances from their past, relevant to criminal justice system, healthcare, and employment interviews. Questions comprised ‘open questions’, ‘semantic prompting’ (where semantic knowledge was used to prompt specific episodic retrieval) and ‘visual–verbal prompting’ (a pie-diagram with prompts to recall specific details, for example, who, what, and where). Half the participants received the questions in advance. Consistent with previous research, autistic participants reported memories with reduced specificity. For both groups, visual–verbal prompting support improved specificity and episodic relevance, while semantic prompting also aided recall for employment questions (but not health or criminal justice system). Findings offer new practical insight for interviewers to facilitate communication with typically developing and autistic adults. Lay abstract During many types of interviews (e.g. in employment, with the police, and in healthcare), we need to recall detailed memories of specific events, which can be difficult for autistic people in response to commonly used questions. This is especially because these tend to be open questions (i.e. very broad). Autistic people have disproportionately high rates of physical and mental health conditions, are more likely to interact with police, and are the most underemployed disability group. However, interviewers are often unsure about how to adapt their communication for autistic people. Our research tested whether different types of prompts enabled autistic people to recall specific memories (memories of a single event within one day). Participants were asked about situations relating to witnessing a crime (e.g. at the bank), physical or mental health scenarios and employment interviews (e.g. a time you’ve met a deadline). We tested the following: Open questions: basic questions only (e.g. ‘tell me about a time you went to the cinema’), Semantic prompting: a general prompt (e.g. ‘do you enjoy going to the cinema?’) before asking for a specific instance (‘tell me about a time you went to the cinema?’), Visual–verbal prompting: asking participants to recall when it happened, who was there, the actions that occurred, the setting, and any objects. With visual–verbal prompting, autistic and typically developing participants’ memories were more specific and detailed. Semantic prompting was also effective for employment questions. Our study shows that autistic people can recall specific memories when they are appropriately prompted. Visual–verbal prompting may be effective across different situations.

Ameliorating the disadvantage for autistic job seekers: An initial evaluation of adapted employment interview questions

“…It is worth mentioning that participants in the current study also fed back that offering preparation time by providing the questions in advance of the interview would be another helpful adaptation (see also Norris et al, 2020 ). For the purposes of the present study, it was felt that this would reduce experimental control, making it difficult to disentangle whether the adaptations to the questions per se were effective.…”

“…More structured questioning appears to have a twofold benefit in (1) providing support for executive functions and cognitive processes such as relational processing in memory retrieval while also (2) supporting social cognition by diminishing ambiguity about what is required from their response. More explicit and cued questioning has been shown to be helpful for autistic adults in applied contexts such as the Criminal Justice System (see Maras, in press ), but remains to be fully tested in the context of employment interviews (see Norris et al, 2020 ).…”

Supporting autistic adults’ episodic memory recall in interviews: The role of executive functions, theory of mind, and language abilities

“…Recall specificity in police, healthcare, and employment interviews. Norris et al (2020) tested the effectiveness of three levels of questioning support on the specificity and relevance of interviewees' episodic ABM recall. In total, 30 autistic and 30 TD participants were asked a series of questions about personally experienced events that could be relevant to interviews in police (e.g.…”

“…The explicit use of support (such as using specific questions and detailed instructions) has also recently been shown to reduce inaccurate and improve accurate reporting (Almeida et al, 2019;Maras et al, 2013Maras et al, , 2020Mattison et al, 2015Mattison et al, , 2018, improve recall specificity (i.e. of specific events with rich contextual detail), and relevance (Norris et al, 2020), and improve the quality of autistic adults' responses in employment interviews (Maras et al, 2021).…”

Interviewing alleged victims with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities and autism: A field study of police‐investigated cases of physical and sexual abuse in a Norwegian national sample

“…Some studies have examined interviews of adults with ID and autism in an experimental setting. However, very few studies have analysed real-life investigative interviews with these groups (Gudjonsson et al 2000;Ternes and Yuille 2008;Maras and Bowler 2014;Hershkowitz 2018;Norris et al 2020). The current study adds to the research field by analysing how investigative interviews of adults and children with ID and autism are performed.…”