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Lawtalk New Zealand
452 April, 1996. Pages 28-29.
How questions and body-parts diagrams could affect the content of young
children’s disclosures
(Dr) Jane Mary Rawls
Registered Psychologist, Clinical and Child Psychologist
The primary mode of gathering evidence from children
is through interviewing. Report veracity can be tested against physical
evidence but in some sexual abuse cases, for example, this may be absent, and
we are left merely with the adults' questions and the child's answers.
Judges, lawyers, and juries clearly believe that the age and abilities of the
child witness can affect their understanding of legal questions and
procedures, and s23 (g) of the Evidence Amendment Act (1989) reflects
this. Despite this, the court process
still remains complex and requires children to demonstrate a clear
understanding of truth, lies, and promises in a way that might make some
adults falter, and to answer complex questions in Court.
The process of interviewing before and during a Court appearance is an
interactive and fluid one that is influenced and shaped by the form of the
questions asked as well as the information provided by the answers given.
There is now a proliferation of child testimony research that looks at the
effects of different question forms on the accuracy and malleability of
children's reports (for a review see Ceci & Bruck, I993, in the Psychological
Bulletin). The NZ Law Foundation recently funded a study by the author that
examined the effect of repeated interviews on young children's reports of
events in which interviews consisted of either Closed questions such as may
be asked of a child by a concerned person (e.g., "Did (s)he touch you on
the...?"), or Open questions of the sort that should be asked in an
evidential interview (e.g., "What happened?"), or a mixture of
these two forms of questions. The believability of these children's reports,
as assessed by a panel of professionals working in the legal arena (lawyers,
police. psychologists), and the relationship with s23 (g) (Evidence Amendment
Act 1989), will be described in a later article.
Thirty 5-year-olds have taken part in the study so far (and seven 4-year-olds
are still taking part). Each has participated individually in a series of
four videotaped and observed sessions in which a male adult research
assistant played a dressing-up game with the child. These sessions involved
small amounts of touching when items such as hats and jewellery were put on
or taken off each other, and sometimes required the child to keep secret an
additional minor benign event. Four interviews were conduced over a period 1
and 2 weeks after the games, and included a segment in which the child was
asked about truth, lies, and promises, before being asked to indicate who
touched whom, where the touching occurred, and with what part of the
toucher's body. A body-parts diagram (similar
to those used in evidential interviews) was introduced in the second
interview as a prop to facilitate reports. Interviews were conducted with 10
children in each of either Open (who, where, when, what), Closed (yes or no
answer), or Mixed (both open and closed) question conditions.
Only 40% of the 5-year-old sample could, after varying degrees of exposure to
examples, provide an acceptable definition of truth, lies, and promises. Half of these children happened to have
been in the closed questioning interview condition, whose participants
subsequently produced the least accurate reports of interactions and the most
fantasy. Thus, it appears that the
question form used in the interview was a more accurate predictor of report
accuracy than promising to tell the truth.
All the children could describe in general terms having had several dress-up
games with a man (but varied widely over the number of sessions) and could
name many of the dress-up items they had played with and on which body-part
they had been worn. But they had much
more difficulty saying when these events had occurred historically (varying
from "yesterday" to "5 months ago") and/or allocating
specific dress-up events to the correct session. Results showed the initial superiority of
open questions in obtaining accurate reports.
For example, when children were interviewed for the first time about
the first dress-up session, open questions resulted in an average accuracy of
32% correct compared with those interviewed with mixed questions (20%) or
closed questions (9%). Similarly, in
this first interview, children's descriptions of the last dress-up session
were more accurate when open questions were used (13%), less accurate when
interviews comprised mixed questions (4%) and not at all accurate (0%/) when
closed questions were used. However,
by the fourth time they were questioned about the first session, the accuracy
of children in the closed questions had increased (16%) as had those asked
mixed questions (25%), but had decreased for the children being asked open
questions (I5%). Other research (cf Ceci & Bruck, 1993) has shown that
while direct (closed) questions can serve as a prompt for memory recall, they
may also lead to intrusion of other inaccuracies because they depend on the
options provided by the interviewer.
Provisional analyses of data indicate that children found it easier to
recount the items used during dress-up games (32% accurate) and who had
chosen and received (30% each) specific items, and on which part of the body
they had been worn (28%), but they found it extremely difficult to provide an
accurate account of the sequence in which dress-up items had been chosen and
placed on their own and the adult’s body (4% accuracy).
Of concern was the frequency and type of commission errors made by those
children interviewed with closed questions and, to a lesser degree, those
asked a mix of open and closed questions.
Their errors seemed to evolve over time with repeated interviews and,
for many, they first were reported when body-parts diagrams were used during
their second interviews. For some
children, these errors seemed relatively harmless and included climbing
ladders, going to other rooms, having other children present, wearing
elaborate costumes, and tickling with feathers. But the elaborations of other children were
more serious. Nearly a quarter of the total sample of children (24%) reported
inappropriate adult-child touching. Three children (10%) reported genital
touching (two under closed questioning and one under mixed questioning) that
involved either adult-child, child-adult, or mutual touching, and two of
these children also reported touching under their upper clothes. Two more children (7%) reported either the
adult touching their bottom or their touching the adult's bottom and two
others (7%) reported mutual adult-child touching under their clothing (e.g.,
rubbing in pretend cream). Reports of
mutual undressing without touching were also common, although this often
seemed to reflect a confusion between dress-up items and ordinary
clothes. The videotaped record of
dress-up interactions did not support these reports. Each child was debriefed for ethical
reasons at the end of the series of interviews.
The accuracy of children's diagram markings used to illustrate adult-child
and child-adult touching was compared with the videotaped records of actual
mutual touching. Again, children in
the open question condition clearly were more accurate about adult-child
touching when presented with body-parts diagrams (71% and 60%, for adult to
child and child to adult respectively) than children asked mixed questions
(31% and 38%) or those asked closed questions (28% and 22%). This interactive effect of the body-parts
diagrams with the type of question form used during interviews was
unprogrammed and unexpected, but it clearly demonstrates that open questions
used alone resulted in the most accurate reports, whilst the mixed and closed
questioning resulted in significantly reduced report accuracy.
"Secrets" were also programmed for each child. Children never volunteered
to tell them but, when specifically asked about them, seven (23%) always
declined to disclose, eight (27%) sometimes described them accurately and
sometimes didn’t disclose, six (20%) consistently provided accurate accounts,
three (10%) gave some true and some false accounts, and one (3%) either gave
no account or a false one. False accounts were always benign and seemed to be
given to avoid breaking the child's implicit contract with the adult
assistant. Five other children (17%)
described fictional unprogrammed events that included inappropriate touching
and said that they were the programmed "secrets".
In summary, it seems that the use of interviews consisting of open-ended
questions only is by far the safest option when interviewing children as it
results in greater accuracy of reports after a minimal delay and, overall,
decreases the chances of commission errors, especially when body-parts
diagrams are used as an integral part of that interview. The implications of
these results for future complainants, and their relevance to evidential and
court procedures, were the focus of a series of seminars planned for members
of the legal profession in late March. Further seminars are proposed for
later in the year.
Biographical note:
Dr Jane Rawls completed a Masters degree in Psychology and a post-graduate
Diploma in Clinical Psychology at the University
of Waikato and a PhD in
Developmental and Child Psychology at the University
of Kansas in the USA. She has a private practice as a child and
clinical psychologist in Hamilton,
serving as a Specialist Report Writer for the Family Court and consulting as
an expert witness in the High Court.
Her doctoral research was in the area of children's testimony and she
has continued to research in this area, supported in past years by research
grants from FRST. Over 1995 she has
worked on the research described in this article, supported by a research
grant from the NZ Law Foundation.
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