THE INFLUENCE OF SUGGESTIVE PARENT-CHILD CONVERSATIONS AND INTERVIEWS ON CHILDREN’S MEMORY REPORTS

Within investigations of child sexual abuse and other forms of child maltreatment, interviews with children are often the only sources of information about alleged events. The critical implications of children’s memory reports for the outcome of cases have led researchers to consider the extent to which children can be trusted to provide reliable accounts of events. Empirical work on this topic has demonstrated that under certain circumstances, even young children can accurately remember and report past events; yet, there are numerous factors that can drastically reduce the accuracy of children’s recollections. For example, a substantial amount of research has demonstrated the deleterious effect of suggestive interviewing on children’s memory reports. However, what is less clear are factors outside of the interview context that may also compromise the accuracy of children’s reports of events that they have experienced. One such factor concerns the information that is imparted to children in the course of conversations with their parents. This study was designed to examine one way in which parents’ conversations may undermine children’s memory for a salient experience. This aim was accomplished by exposing some parents to false information about a staged event (an archeological dig) that their children had independently experienced. The parents were then asked to talk about this event with their children, and the children’s memory for the event was elicited within either suggestive or neutral interviews after delays of 1- and 2-week delays, as well as during a final neutral interview three weeks after the dig. Analyses of the parent-child conversation revealed that parents’ incorporated suggestions into their conversations with children, which led children to report false information within both the parent-child conversations and final interview. Interviewers’ suggestions also interfered with children’s remembering across interviews. Contrary to expectation, however, interviewers’ suggestions did not amplify the effect of parents’ suggestions on children’s remembering. The accuracy of children’s reports in the final interview was also not influenced by how parents structured conversations about the archeological dig with their children. The ways in which these findings can contribute to an understanding of children’s cognition and guidelines for forensic interviewing are discussed.Doctor of Philosoph