The effects of narrative practice on children's testimony and disclosure of secrets

Abstract

The present study explored the effects of different types of narrative practices on the accuracy and abundance of information elicited from children and the disclosure of secrets. Seventy-one children ages 3-6 years experienced a scripted encounter with a photographer; then they were interviewed about the event after participating in one of four different narrative practices. The narrative practices comprised either a discussion of topics drawing from episodic memory or topics drawing from semantic memory. Further, either open-ended prompts were used during the practice narratives or directive questions were used. The episodic topics were related to past experienced events, whereas the semantic topics consisted of general knowledge about what they liked to do. The results showed that children who were trained to respond to open-ended prompts early in the interview responded more informatively later, but the specificity of the topics had no effect on their accuracy and informativeness. Neither the topics nor types of questions had effects on the results of disclosure. KEYWORDS child sexual abuse, disclosure of secrets, narrative practices, rapport building

Can rapport building strategies, age, and question type influence preschoolers’ disclosures of adult wrongdoing?

“…Contrary to our expectations, we did not see any significant differences between the two rapport conditions for the children’s disclosure rate, amount of information, accuracy rate, or type of detail. While unexpected, these findings concur with several past studies that have not found a significant difference between different verbal rapport building strategies (Hardy & Leeuwen, ; Lyon et al ., ; Yi & Lamb, ). Furthermore, these results contradict the findings by Collins () who did observe a difference in productivity with school‐aged children when using a jigsaw compared to a verbal rapport condition.…”

“…The children’s accounts were quantified into information units using a coding system similar to Brown et al . () and Yi and Lamb (). All information relating to people (e.g., a man), actions and affective states (e.g., broke), attributes (e.g., the blue), objects and settings (e.g., toy), and temporal information (e.g., afterwards) was given one point.…”

“…() reported no significant differences in children’s disclosures (of playing with, and accidently breaking, toys) when asking children open‐ended questions about their likes/dislikes/what they did the previous day when compared to direct questions about the child’s life. Similarly, neither Hardy and Van Leeuween () nor Yi and Lamb () found any substantial differences in the informativeness or accuracy of children’s statements (regarding staged events) when asking questions about hobbies compared to asking children to describe a past event during the rapport building phase.…”

“…It is suggested that rapport building has a range of benefits, such as decreasing children’s reluctance and anxiety (Almerigogna, Ost, Bull & Ahehurst, ), building trust (Hershkowitz, ), providing an opportunity to practice answering questions (Brown, Lamb, Lewis, Pipe, Orbach & Wolfman, ), enabling the interviewer to assess the child’s cognitive and verbal abilities (Collins, Doherty‐Sneddon & Doherty, ), and potentially making children more resistant to suggestive influence by making the interviewer more approachable (Saywitz et al ., ). These benefits are, in turn, assumed to potentially help increase children’s willingness to disclose sensitive information, as well as to positively affect the completeness and accuracy of their accounts (e.g., Brown et al ., ; Hershkowitz, ; Lyon et al ., ; Roberts, Lamb & Sternberg, ; Sternberg, Lamb, Hershkowitz, et al ., ; Teoh & Lamb, ; Yi & Lamb, ). Due to difficulties operationalizing and measuring the degree of experienced rapport during child interviews, scholars have primarily focused on measuring indirect effects such as the quality and quantity of information given by children (Saywitz et al ., ).…”

“…One common rapport building strategy is to ask children open‐ended questions about non‐threatening topics or personally meaningful interests (see Hershkowitz, ; Saywitz, Goodman & Lyon., ). Early use of open‐ended questions compared to more directive questions has been associated with longer accounts during the investigative phase of an interview (Hershkowitz, ), more detailed responses to open‐ended invitational prompts (Brown et al ., ; Sternberg et al ., ), improvements in accuracy (Roberts et al ., ; Yi & Lamb, ), and increased resistance to misleading questions (Roberts et al ., ; Yi & Lamb, ). Research comparing differing topics covered during rapport building has mainly shown non‐significant results.…”