Say it once again: Effects of repeated questions on children's event recall

Abstract

In this paper, we review research examining the influences of repeated questioning on children's event recall. Issues addressed include how children's free recall changes across multiple recounts of the same event, whether responding to specific questions about an event affects subsequent responses to those same questions, and whether there are developmental differences in how children respond to repeated questioning. Both naturalistic studies of conversational remembering and more controlled studies using standardized interviews are discussed. Effects of repeated questioning both within and across interviews are assessed. In integrating the research findings, we present a developmental framework for understanding the effects of repeated questioning that relies on children's developing memory and narrative skills as well as their social understanding of the recall context.

A Decade Later: Adolescents' Memory for Medical Emergencies

“…When the families were visited at each successive interview, they were asked about how much the target events had been discussed since our last visit, and on all those after 6 months had passed the parents claimed that the events either had not been talked about at all or there had occasionally been only brief allusions to them since the events were 'old news'. Similar patterns of event discussion have been found by others (e.g., Fivush & Schwarzmueller, 1995).…”

“…This is not to say that the only reason the injury event was so well-remembered is that it was highly discussed, or in other words, that it would not have been well-remembered if not for family discussion. For salient real-life events, some researchers have found that recall amount and accuracy were not related to how frequently the events were talked about, according to parental reports (Fivush et al, 2004;Fivush & Schwarzmueller, 1995). Larkina and Bauer (2012) experimentally manipulated the amount of parent-child talk about target events by instructing parents to treat some randomly selected events as 'family stories' and talk about them with their 4-year-olds at least monthly for a year, while other selected events were seldom discussed.…”

Recounting the same events again and again: children's consistency across multiple interviews

“…Turning ®rst to investigations of consistency, some recent reviews have appeared (Fivush et al, in press;Fivush and Schwarzmueller, 1995;Poole and White, 1995). The type of interview seems to have important effects.…”

“…Instead, questions differed considerably across interviews. As well, children are sensitive to the listener's state of knowledge and often do not repeat information the listener already knows (Fivush and Schwarzmueller, 1995;Menig-Peterson, 1975). Since many of the repeated interviews in the above studies were conducted by interviewers familiar with the events being recounted, this may have negatively affected consistency.…”

“…We will not discuss repetition of the same questions within the same interview since these data have recently been reviewed (Fivush et al, in press;Fivush and Schwarzmueller, 1995;Poole and White, 1995) and all authors concur that this intra-interview repetition has a serious negative impact on the consistency of children's reports. There have been mixed reports of children's consistency across interviews that ask the same questions.…”