Forensic Interviews with Children: Exploring the Kinds of Information Interviewers Prompt for and those which Children Provide

Child maltreatment court cases often rely heavily on children’s eyewitness testimony as primary evidence, because alternative or corroborating evidence is often unavailable. When obtaining children's testimony, forensic interviewers are faced with the challenging task of gathering the specific details required by the criminal justice system, whilst managing children's developmental capabilities. Much research has focused on the effects of question structure (e.g., open/closed) on children's recall, however less focus has been placed on the content of these questions. In this study we analysed forensic interviews conducted with children in New Zealand (n=24), to explore the kinds of information children are being asked for and what they are offering in their accounts. Interviewers asked for, and children provided many different categories of information in their accounts and rarely indicated any difficulty or tentativeness in their responses. We were unable to evaluate the accuracy of children’s information but suggest caution should be exercised by interviewers in asking for categories of information that may exceed children’s capabilities, given their tendency to guess, infer or be compliant to interviewer requests in the absence of memory, understanding or knowledge to do so.