Conducting Successful Memory Interviews with Children
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Conducting Successful Memory Interviews with Children Rachel Zajac1 · Deirdre A. Brown2 Published online: 14 December 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2017
Abstract Practitioners interview children in a range of settings to assess their wellbeing and to make decisions about their care. These interviews often have a significant memory component. Interviewing children about their past experiences, however, is a challenging task. It requires practitioners to be sensitive to children’s developmental capacities and vulnerabilities, to understand how to facilitate effective retrieval and reporting of information, and to set aside the usual dynamics and expectations of how adults and children communicate. Managing these challenges requires constant evaluation, self-reflection, and professional development. Fortunately, several decades of research into children’s memory and narrative development has provided a robust platform on which to base practice. Here, we provide a framework for devising a general approach to memory interviews with children that is both evidence-based and practical. Keywords Interviewing · Memory · Child development · Narrative development
Introduction Anyone who has ever asked a child “what did you do at school today?” knows that eliciting detailed information from children is not straightforward. Interviewing children about their past experiences is undeniably challenging; interviewing them under difficult circumstances is even more so. When practitioners speak to children in contexts where the stakes are high—in care and protection investigations, for example—there is pressure to elicit detailed, specific, and accurate information that will effectively inform decision-making. How should this information be obtained and interpreted? Because practice is indisputably enhanced when we draw on an evidence base, we answer this question here using several decades of scientific research into children’s memory and narrative development. We draw particularly from an extensive body of research on questioning children about maltreatment. Based on this literature, we provide a framework for approaching memory interviewing that is both * Rachel Zajac [email protected] 1
Psychology Department, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand
School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
2
evidence-based and practical (see Table 1 for a summary of implications for practice). Myriad factors interact to influence what a child will say in a memory interview with a professional. Generally speaking, there are four factors to consider: (1) the context in which the child is questioned, (2) the topic about which the child is questioned, (3) the individual child, and (4) the questions that are asked. In this article, we outline the research consensus on each of these four factors, followed by a brief section on interpreting and preserving the memory information that children provide.
Context Conversations between professio
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