Reconceptualizing Children's Suggestibility: Bidirectional and Temporal Properties
Livia L. Gilstrap, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; Stephen J. Ceci, Department of Human Development, Cornell University. We would like to thank the West Yorkshire Police Department Training Facility at Bishopgarth for its commitment to support research endeavors and to improve interviewer training. Particularly, we would like to acknowledge the support of Sharon Hewitt. The manuscript was tremendously improved by the work of Roger Bakeman, whose expertise in sequential analysis resulted in substantial improvements to this work. Funds were provided through an American Psychological Association Dissertation Award, an American Psychological Foundation (APF) Dissertation Award, a Division 41 Psychology-Law Grant-in-Aid, a Mario Eunadi International Travel Award, and a National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health.
Abstract
Forty-one children (3 to 7 years) were exposed to a staged event and later interviewed by 1 of 41 professional interviewers. All interviews were coded with a detailed, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive coding scheme capturing adult behaviors (leading questions vs. neutral) and child behaviors (acquiescence vs. denial) in a temporally organized manner. Overall, interviewers' use of leading questions did not result in increased acquiescence as previously found. However, one specific type of leading question (i.e., inaccurate misleading) was followed by acquiescence. Lagged sequential analyses showed that it was possible to predict directly from child-to-child behavior, effectively skipping the intervening adult behavior. This result raises questions about the current conceptualization that suggestibility is driven by adult behaviors.
