Allowing a child to freely recall events clearly produces the most accurate reports. However, because very young children give more information when cued, the clinician
must deal with the issue of whether to ask specific ques-tions or provide the child with prompts. This is a serious dilemma: Does one take the risk of getting an inaccurate report that may be harmful to a person being accused, or does one risk missing important information about actual abuse, placing the child at further risk?
At the very least, interview questions should proceed from the open-ended to the more specific. More specific questions can be crafted using information that the child has already provided, as opposed to using questions that give the child information the interviewer may be unsure whether they have had prior to the evaluation. The deci-sion to use leading questions must ultimately be left to the interviewer and should be based on the particular cir-cumstances of the evaluation and its outcome. However, using leading questions should clearly be a careful clinical decision, as opposed to a result of poor interviewing tech-niques. If such questions are used, the questions and their answers should be documented, preferably verbatim.
Any reports or testimony about information received fol-lowing leading questions should be accompanied by statements making clear that this information may be less accurate than information obtained under free recall con-ditions.
Methods for Improving Recall and Reporting of Events
Some evidence has emerged that prior practice and train-ing in how to recall and report events improve both accu-racy and breadth of recall. In particular, the work of Karen Saywitz and her colleagues (Saywitz and Snyder 1996) has shown promise. They have developed a tech-nique they call “narrative elaboration.” School-age chil-dren were shown five ways to remember an event, each represented by a picture on a card: People, Setting, Actions, Conversation/Affective State, and Conse-quence. The children viewed an event or had something occur to them and were taught to use the above strategy for organizing their narrative report of the event. They were then interviewed, first under a free recall condition:
“When you tell me what happened to you, tell as much as you can about what really happened, even the little things, without guessing or making anything up.” After they had given as much information as they could, each card was presented with the prompt, “Does this help remind you of anything more?”
Saywitz and colleagues found that children inter-viewed in this way remembered about one-third more information than control subjects, with girls performing better than boys. The most information obtained was on
the physical appearance of the persons in the event. The most errors (nearly 75%) occurred on the Consequences card. This card was an attempt to help the child remem-ber what type of things ensued after the event. It was concluded that the concept may have been too abstract for the age of the children in the study. Saywitz and col-leagues have subsequently refined the cards, and have adapted the technique for use with preschool children, although with somewhat mixed results. Still, the concept of training children to be more effective reporters is a promising one, especially when employing procedures where careful, open-ended interview questions are used.
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