Project Summary/Abstract
Child maltreatment is widely recognized as a serious threat to children's well-being and health. In maltreatment
cases, the fidelity and credibility of the child witness/victim's report is often critical to securing an outcome in
the best interest of the child. Eliciting information from children about the time-course and sequence of alleged
maltreatment is central in these cases. The field of child interviewing is actively debating how best to question
children about sequence in these cases with little existing empirical research on which to draw. There is a
pressing need to identify strategies for obtaining information from even young, cognitively vulnerable children
about the time course and sequence of alleged events. The proposed research will determine (1) how children
are questioned about event sequence, and how they respond, across age, in maltreatment investigations (2)
how differences in children's age, comprehension, working memory (WM), attention, and episodic memory
may impact their abilities to accurately recall event sequence, and (3) how questions and child responses
about sequence impact the likelihood that jury-eligible adults' will understand and believe children's allegations
of abuse. These aims will be achieved via four proposed projects. In Project 1, the research team will code a
sample of 581 legal transcripts to assess the sequencing content included in the prompts used to question
child witnesses about their alleged maltreatment experiences and confusion in children's responses to the
questions. Of particular interest is identifying instances of potential ambiguity for young children. In Projects 2
and 3, the research team will conduct laboratory studies with 644 4- to 12-year-olds to test the roles of
cognition and context in children's responses to sequencing questions like those identified in the maltreatment
case transcripts. Memory and response biases are predicted to be most pronounced with decreasing age and
WM, and when attention is divided. In Project 3, the research team will examine children's responses to
sequencing questions with potentially ambiguous interpretations. Their interpretations of the questions' intent
are expected to vary with age and WM in predictable ways. Finally, in Project 4 the research team will examine
mock juror interpretations of sequencing questions and children's responses. Participants from across the U.S.
(N = 300) will rate the credibility of adult questioners and child respondents selected from Projects 1-3 and the
accuracy with which mock jurors understand various sequencing questions and responses from our laboratory
studies will be determined. The proposed work is innovative in that it represents a multi-dimensional approach
to examining the cognitive, developmental, and contextual appropriateness of varying sequencing questions
asked of children in maltreatment investigations and determining the extent to which these questions may
impact just decisions in maltreatment cases. This topic has been surprisingly understudied given the
substantial implications for understanding the foundations of children's sequential knowledge and memory, and
for improving health-relevant legal outcomes in cases of child maltreatment.