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by Daniel H. Swerdlow-Freed, Ph.D
There are various circumstances where adults provide information about their conversations with children. In informal settings, for example, one parent may report to the other a child's statement, or a teacher may report a conversation with a child to the child's parent. In litigation, statements made by a child to a parent, teacher or therapist may be presented to the court in support of a motion. If there is suspicion that a child has been abused or neglected, the child may be interviewed by police, a prosecuting attorney, a Child Protective Services investigator, or a forensic interviewer. In these situations, there may be an exception to the hearsay rule and the court may permit testimony about the conversation with the child.
An implicit presumption that underlies the acceptance of such hearsay testimony is that adults can accurately recall their conversations with children.1 For many years this presumption went untested. Consequently, there was no empirical evidence that established whether adults are able to accurately and reliably recall and report conversations with children. Such accuracy and reliability are extremely important when a therapist, forensic interviewer or other professional provides hearsay testimony in lieu of the child's own testimony, and the trier of fact must decide how much weight to give that evidence.
The ability to reliably report a conversation with a child is dependant upon two factors.2 One is how precisely and thoroughly the interviewer extracts the information from the child, and the other is how precisely and thoroughly the interviewer recalls the details of the interview. The importance of precision in both areas is emphasized by researchers2 who astutely note: "To properly evaluate a child's statements presented through hearsay, jurors and fact finders need to hear not only what the child said (the gist of the interview), but how it was said (a verbatim account including specific questions and answers)", (p. 356).
There is substantial research that shows young children, even preschoolers, are capable of accurately reporting experienced events. However, a major factor affecting children's ability to accurately report their experiences is their susceptibility to suggestion.3 An effective way to reduce suggestibility is to ask questions in a neutral tone, using developmentally appropriate, open-ended questions. Questions that may be suggestive or leading should be minimized. If such inquires are unavoidable, these should be posed at the end of the interview and phrased in the least suggestive term possible ("Did something ever happen to your butt?" is preferable to "Did he touch your butt?" or "Did he stick something in your butt?") In addition, good interviewing practice involves following up a positive answer to a suggestive or leading question with an open-ended inquiry that seeks elaboration based on recall memory.
One study2 that investigated the reliability of hearsay testimony involved 27 experienced forensic interviewers who interviewed preschool children about an event the children had experienced. Following each interview the interviewers were questioned by the experimenters and these conversations were audio-taped. Next, the interviewers wrote detailed analyses of their interviews with the children, from memory, with instructions to provide as much of the exact wording of questions and answers as possible.
The results of this study showed that even these experienced interviewers failed to report a significant amount of information in both their audio recall and written analyses, compared to the original taped interviews with the children. Furthermore, the interviewers were unable to accurately recall many of the verbatim questions they had asked as well as the children's verbatim answers.
These results led the study's authors to conclude, "In summary, our results suggest that the hearsay testimony of children's interviewers is degraded. Even immediately after an interview, important content was omitted from hearsay accounts, and the majority of the verbatim information (specific wording and content of questions and answers) was lost. Our results also suggest that interviewers are unlikely to be able to accurately reconstruct verbatim information later" (p. 369).
A second study4 evaluated the accuracy of "verbatim" contemporaneous notes by comparing them with transcribed audio recordings of the same interviews. Here, the interviewers were 20 experienced forensic youth investigators who questioned the children about suspected incidents of physical and sexual abuse. The results of this study showed that investigators' notes did not consistently and accurately reflect many of the details reported by children or the questions used to elicit these details. In addition, the investigators' notes did not accurately represent the information obtained from the children or the manner in which the information was elicited.
These results led the authors to conclude, "Distortions like those described here are of great significance in forensic contexts: Both the incomplete reporting of utterances and the misidentification of eliciting utterance types seriously impede the evaluation of children's accounts" (p. 705).
The results of these two studies raise important and legitimate concern about the reliability of an interviewer's notes and the ability of adults to precisely and exactly recall and report conversations with children. One solution is to audio- or videotape all forensic interviews of children. This procedure can accurately and reliably memorialize child interviews, and may make it possible to limit the number of investigative interviews to which a child must submit. This approach also offers the best procedure to substantiate that a forensic interview was properly conducted. Unfortunately, electronic recording is not standard practice in the United States and studies such as the ones reviewed here indicate there is a basis to challenge the accuracy and reliability of unrecorded forensic interviews of children.
References:
1. Bruck, M., Ceci, S.J., & Francoeur, E. (1999) The accuracy of mothers' memories of conversations with their preschool children. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Vol. 5, 89-106.
2. Warren, A.R. & Woodall, C.E. (1999) The reliability of hearsay testimony: How well do interviewers recall their interviews with children? Psychology, Public Policy, and Law Vol. 5, 355-371.
3. Lamb, M.E., Sternberg, K.J., & Esplin, P.W. (1998) Conducting investigative interviews of alleged sexual abuse victims. Child Abuse and Neglect, Vol. 22, 813-823.
4. Lamb, M.E., Orbach, Y., Sternberg, K.J., Hershkowitz, I., & Horowitz, D. (2000) Accuracy of investigators' verbatim notes of their forensic interviews with alleged child abuse victims. Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 24, 699-708.
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