| 2021 |
Klemfuss, Jessica Zoe |
R01Activity Code Description:
To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Children's Comprehension and Memory of Event Sequences and Its Implications For Maltreatment Disclosure @ University of California-Irvine
Project Summary/Abstract Child maltreatment is widely recognized as a serious threat to children's well-being and health. In maltreatment cases, the fidelity and credibility of the child witness/victim's report is often critical to securing an outcome in the best interest of the child. Eliciting information from children about the time-course and sequence of alleged maltreatment is central in these cases. The field of child interviewing is actively debating how best to question children about sequence in these cases with little existing empirical research on which to draw. There is a pressing need to identify strategies for obtaining information from even young, cognitively vulnerable children about the time course and sequence of alleged events. The proposed research will determine (1) how children are questioned about event sequence, and how they respond, across age, in maltreatment investigations (2) how differences in children's age, comprehension, working memory (WM), attention, and episodic memory may impact their abilities to accurately recall event sequence, and (3) how questions and child responses about sequence impact the likelihood that jury-eligible adults' will understand and believe children's allegations of abuse. These aims will be achieved via four proposed projects. In Project 1, the research team will code a sample of 581 legal transcripts to assess the sequencing content included in the prompts used to question child witnesses about their alleged maltreatment experiences and confusion in children's responses to the questions. Of particular interest is identifying instances of potential ambiguity for young children. In Projects 2 and 3, the research team will conduct laboratory studies with 644 4- to 12-year-olds to test the roles of cognition and context in children's responses to sequencing questions like those identified in the maltreatment case transcripts. Memory and response biases are predicted to be most pronounced with decreasing age and WM, and when attention is divided. In Project 3, the research team will examine children's responses to sequencing questions with potentially ambiguous interpretations. Their interpretations of the questions' intent are expected to vary with age and WM in predictable ways. Finally, in Project 4 the research team will examine mock juror interpretations of sequencing questions and children's responses. Participants from across the U.S. (N = 300) will rate the credibility of adult questioners and child respondents selected from Projects 1-3 and the accuracy with which mock jurors understand various sequencing questions and responses from our laboratory studies will be determined. The proposed work is innovative in that it represents a multi-dimensional approach to examining the cognitive, developmental, and contextual appropriateness of varying sequencing questions asked of children in maltreatment investigations and determining the extent to which these questions may impact just decisions in maltreatment cases. This topic has been surprisingly understudied given the substantial implications for understanding the foundations of children's sequential knowledge and memory, and for improving health-relevant legal outcomes in cases of child maltreatment.
|
0.957 |