This research was designed to examine two broad issues in relation to the investigative interviewing of children (aged 9 to 13 years) with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities. First, how do children with intellectual disabilities perform (relative to children matched for chronological and mental age) when recalling an event in response to various questions? Second, what question types and interview strategies do police officers and caregivers use to elicit accurate and detailed accounts about an event from children with intellectual disabilities? The rationale for exploring each of these issues was to determine possible ways of improving the elicitation of evidence from children with intellectual disabilities. While children with intellectual disabilities constitute a high proportion of all child victims of abuse (Conway, 1994; Goldman, 1994; Morse, et ah, 1970), they rarely provide formal reports of abuse and of those incidents that are reported, few cases progress to court (Henry & Gudjonsson, 1999).
Study 1 used a standard interview protocol containing a variety of questions and an interview structure commonly used in investigative interviews. Specifically, the memory and suggestibility of eighty children with either a mild and moderate intellectual disability (M age = 10.85 years) was examined when recalling an innocuous event that was staged at their school. The children's performance was compared with that of two control groups; a group of mainstream children matched for mental age and a group of mainstream children matched for chronological age. Overall, this study showed that children with both mild and moderate intellectual disabilities can provide accurate and highly specific event-related information hi response to questions recommended in best-practice guidelines. However, their recall
was less complete and less clear in response to free-narrative prompts and less accurate in response to specific questions when compared to both mainstream age-matched groups.
Study 2 provided an in-depth analysis of the types of questions and strategies used by twenty-eight police officers and caregivers when interviewing children with either mild or moderate intellectual disabilities (M age = 11.13 years) about a repeated event that was staged at their school. The results revealed that while the approach used by the police officers was generally consistent with best-practice recommendations (i.e., their interviews contained few leading, coercive or negative strategies), there were many ways in which their approach could be improved. This study also showed that the caregivers used a high proportion of direct and negative strategies to elicit information from their children. Even when caregivers used open-ended questions, their children provided less event-related information than they did to police interviewers. The results of both studies were discussed in relation to current 'best-practice' guidelines for interviewing children and recommendations were offered for improving the quality of field interviews with children who have intellectual disabilities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216978 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Agnew, Sarah Elizabeth, mikewood@deakin.edu.au |
| Publisher | Deakin University. School of Psychology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.deakin.edu.au/disclaimer.html), Copyright Sarah Elizabeth Agnew |
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