NCJ Number
213129
Journal
Legal and Criminological Psychology Volume: 11 Issue: 1 Dated: February 2006 Pages: 81-98
Date Published
February 2006
Length
18 pages
Annotation
The truthfulness of children's statements was measured with the techniques of reality monitoring (RM) and criteria-based content analysis (CBCA), and their scores were analyzed to determine whether their recall had been influenced by the number of times the children had told others about the event at issue prior to their testing.
Abstract
The RM technique successfully distinguished between the children's truthful and fabricated statements, and the analysis determined that a child's repeated recalling and telling of the event strengthened the memory of the event, irrespective of whether the event in question was real or imagined. Whereas the total RM score discriminated between truthful and fabricated recall, the total CBCA score did not. These findings suggest the importance of having investigative interviewers determine how often a child being questioned about an event has given an account of the event to others prior to the current interview. Repeated prior telling of the event tend to increase the child's confidence in the content of his/her recall, whether or not the event being described is real or imagined. The children (n=80, ages 12-13), who attended school in Goteborg, Sweden, participated in an experiment in which half the sample participated in a real event (interaction with a stranger outside his car) and then recalled it either 1 or 4 times to another person over a period of 14 days. The other half of the sample were led to imagine the same event and then to recall it either one or four times. The statements given at the final or only recall session were analyzed with both CBCA and RM. 4 tables and 45 references