Swedish Legal Professionals' Opinions on Child and Adult Witness Memory‐reporting Capabilities: Using the Method of Indirect Comparisons

Abstract

Legal professionals' opinions about the memory abilities of child and adult witnesses are important in the legal process. We surveyed 266 legal professionals (Swedish police, prosecutors, and attorneys) and 33 lay judges about their beliefs about child and adult eyewitnesses' recall and metacognitive abilities. Prior research has usually asked for direct comparisons of children and adults but this may be rare in forensic practice. The respondents completed a story questionnaire (about a 9-or 45-year-old person witnessing an event), allowing indirect, or researcher-made, comparisons. In contrast to previous research (direct comparisons), our participants mostly rated children and adults to be on an equal level, but within-group consensus was low. Also, fairly few differences emerged between the groups' beliefs. Finally, the participants' opinions in our study were less in line with results from eyewitness research, compared with previous research using direct comparisons. Implications for legal and research practice are discussed.

On Juror Decision Making: An Empathic Inquiry

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Police's and victim care officers' beliefs about memory and investigative interviewing with children: Survey findings from Malaysia

“…Buck et al (2014) in the United States revealed that knowledge of child interviewing research was poorest among university students eligible for jury service, as compared with forensic interviewers, public defenders, and forensic psychologists, but the forensic interviewers did not believe that children's answers to open‐ended questions can be as accurate as adults. In Sweden, Knutsson and Allwood (2015) reported that police and legal professionals generally did not view child witnesses to be less competent than adult witnesses in providing reliable memory‐based report, contrasting the general assumption in existing literature that the memory of children are inferior to those of adults. In a study by Dodier et al (2019), French court experts, who are clinician practitioners, thought children are as good as, if not better than adults at retrieving an episodic event.…”

Beliefs About Young Children as Witnesses: a Survey of Experienced Defense Lawyers and Psychological Expert Witnesses in Norway

“…A survey of fairly small samples of Swedish police investigators, prosecutors, and defense lawyers (Knutsson and Allwood 2014) showed that these professional groups believed child witnesses aged 7-11 years to be less reliable and more suggestible than adult witnesses but also that the spontaneous testimonies, and the free accounts of the children were as reliable as those of adult witnesses. A follow-up study by these authors (Knutsson and Allwood 2015), where opinions were tested indirectly through judgments of actual cases, found that the same professional groups judged child witnesses to be equally capable as adult witnesses. In all these studies considerable within-sample disagreement was observed.…”