Researchers to study ways to improve child witness reports
USC Gould Professor Thomas Lyon, a nationally recognized law and psychology scholar, was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study ways to improve child witness reports.
Lyon is the co-principal investigator in the 18-month study, “The Use of Narrative Enhancement to Facilitate Children's Productivity in Eyewitness Testimony,” which will identify how to obtain detailed information from child witnesses without asking leading questions.
The new study complements a separate series of studies that Lyon is overseeing that examines how non-disclosing maltreated children can be encouraged to reveal abuse. Lyon and his co-researchers received a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Development for that research.
This latest study is designed to address a different problem – how to maximize the number of details from children who are willing to disclose.
“Research shows that suggestive questioning leads to harmful results in children,” Lyon said. “You need to be specific without being leading. You need to be non-leading without being vague.”
Lyon and his researchers are testing a number of techniques called “recall enhancement” to find ways to elicit more detailed responses from children without probing or asking too many follow-up questions.
For example, investigators may demonstrate they are listening to a child by nodding their heads and making short one-word statements, called facilitators, such as “yea,” “uh huh” and “OK.” Another technique, called vocatives, is also where the interviewers maintain the child’s attention by using his or her name. With verbal encouragement, the interviewer says things like “You’re really helping me understand,” and “You’re going a good job,” to show the child support and reassurance.
“Children generally answer briefly when asked about abuse, so many investigators often ask specific questions,” said Lyon. “They are dealing with reluctant kids, who don’t want to open up, so we’re trying to help solve that dilemma. We believe this might be a way for kids to say more on their own.”
The value of that, Lyon said, is investigators can better distinguish between truth and lies, when children talk openly and in detail.
Many of the techniques Lyon is testing are controversial. Some researchers believe any positive reinforcement may encourage false reports. To address those concerns, Lyon plans to compare truthful and untruthful reports. In his experiments, some children are encouraged to make false reports, or to cover up wrongdoing.
“We plan to look at kids who are saying things that aren’t true and kids who are being truthful,” he said. “We will test if these encouragements, vocatives and back channels have an impact. What we hope we can show is that you can increase the true reports without increasing the false reports.”
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