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Interviewing Children About Real and Fictitious Events: Revisiting the Narrative Elaboration Procedure

NCJ Number
187907
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 25 Issue: 1 Dated: February 2001 Pages: 63-80
Author(s)
Lorinda B. Camparo; Judith T. Wagner; Karen J. Saywitz
Editor(s)
Jeffrey J. Haugaard
Date Published
February 2001
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article reexamined the effectiveness of the Narrative Elaboration (NE) procedure and whether the procedure could lead to increased reporting of fictitious information by child witnesses.
Abstract
Practitioners and researchers agree that there is a need to develop innovative procedures so that interviewers will be able to elicit more complete and reliable information from child witnesses. The NE procedure was designed to provide interviewers with an intermediate step between free-recall questions and specific questions. The NE procedure was designed to help children overcome developmental limitations in memory and communication through training in the use of four “reminder” cue cards. Although previous studies demonstrated the NE procedure’s effectiveness for staged events, several questions regarding its usefulness and potential drawbacks remained. This study was designed to address three issues: the potential of the NE procedure leading to increased reporting of false information by children; a comparison of the children’s reports using the NE procedure compared to children using standard interviews; and the need to shorten the two training sessions and two videotaped segments to increase accessibility and usefulness. Ninety-two elementary school children participated in a staged event. Two weeks later they were randomly assigned to three interview conditions: (a) trained in the use of reminder cue cards, (b) untrained in the use of reminder cue cards, (cue card control group), and (c) a standard interview (standard interview control group). Children were questioned about the staged event and a fictitious event to determine whether children trained in the NE procedure would provide more information about a staged event than would children in the two control groups. Results indicated that children questioned with the NE interview reported a greater amount of accurate, but not a greater amount of inaccurate, information during cue card presentation for the staged event than did the cue card control group. Further analyses indicated that the NE interview group did not report significantly more false information about the fictitious event than did children in the two control groups. The findings indicate that the streamlined NE procedure may serve to provide practitioners with a tool for eliciting more elaborate narratives from children without having to immediately resort to potentially leading specific questions following the children’s insufficient free recall. The study noted that due to the small sample sizes, unacceptable findings for interview group effects for the fictitious event should be treated with caution. Appendix, notes, and references