Effects of age, interview style, time delay, and temperament on children's suggestibility.

Abstract

This study investigated the role of age, type of questions, and temperament characteristics on children's recall. Twenty-eight preschoolers and 28 elementary school children watched a videotape of a bike theft and were interviewed about it immediately and seven weeks later. All of the children received general, non-suggestive questions on the initial interview. For the delayed interview, half of the children were asked general questions and the other half were asked misleading questions. The focus of the analyses was on recall during the delay interview. Memory for central features of the theft was more accurate than for peripheral features. Preschoolers made more errors about the characters' appearance and also were more likely to change their answers when misleading questions were asked. Elementary school children also were influenced by misleading questions. Peripheral information provided about the crime was as inaccurate for both groups when given misleading questions, but not when given open-ended questions. However, older children resisted misleading suggestions more often than did younger children. Finally, temperament influenced recall such that easy-going children were able to provide higher proportion of accurate central features about the crime than were difficult children. In contrast, older children tended to comply with misleading suggestions if they had easygoing natures.