Repeated Questions In Forensic Interviews

The article The Effects of Age and Delay on Responses to Repeated Questions in Forensic Interviews With Children Alleging Sexual Abuse written by Samantha J. Andrews and Michael E. Lamb focuses their study on the repeated questions asked by the forensic interviewers to the children who might have been victims of an alleged child sexual abuse to check if the children don’t contradict the statements they provided, and hereby reinforcing their case against the suspect in the courts. The main research questions that Andrews and Lamb focused on were “the number of times children were asked repeated questions within a single interview session”, “why questions were repeated”, “how interviewers asked repeated questions” and “how children responded”. …show more content…
In this sample, there were 23 Boys and 92 Girls. Almost a third (39 Children) of the participants were abused by penetration, another third (38) of the participants had been touched under the clothes. The Dependent Variables in this study include the responses of the children, contradictions, Delays in responses. Independent variables include they type of questions asked, how they were asked such as were they open ending or close ending questions, age, gender. The study was conducted based on the transcripts and the interviews conducted by the forensic investigators, the data was then looked in detail and analyzed. Firstly all the Repeated questions were found and analyzed, it helped the interviewers to get more information out of the child and to check if the child’s account of what had happened is viable in court and does not have any contradictions. Then the important question was asked, why were the children asked repeated questions and then the questions were found to be asked in six different occasion types such as No Apparent reason, Challenge, Child clarification, interviewer clarification, Digression and Compound. After this the prompts that the interviewers used were analyzed and divided into 4 parts, Invitation, Directive, Option posting and Suggestive. After this it was tested how the children responded to different questions and were divided into 6 …show more content…
They found that closed-ended did put a spotlight on the contradictions of the children, but on the other hand the study proved that the young children were susceptible to adverse effect just as likely as the older children. The findings show that closed-ended prompts were the most repeated prompts (over 69.7%) as they were found to be creating inconsistencies in the child’s statement. It most likely created a pressure in the child to respond of what he/she might thing the interviewer wants to hear. They were more likely to repeat the answer when they were asked the same repeated question for no reason. There was a surprising fact brought up that when the children were asked to clarify their response, they were more likely to contradict the statement or just change it. There are a couple of implications that should be followed after the study, There should be specific guidelines about how the children would be interviewed and how the questions should be repeated at the very minimum required as they tend to put pressure on the children thus leading to contradictions. Personally I think that the questions should not be repeated again and again for no reason, since sexual abuse victims are already in a fragile state of mind, repeated questions would just put more pressure on them and make them more anxious. I wasn’t surprised with the results of the study as