Parental Coaching and Children's Reports of Nonexperienced Events: The Contributions of Forgetting, Source Monitoring, and Acquiesence

9409231 POOLE这个项目将使用一种强大的新型易受暗示手法来研究关于儿童作为证人的优势和劣势的几个重要问题。这种技术类似于父母参与虚假的虐待指控，是完全试点的，不涉及欺骗。在第一阶段，年龄在3到8岁之间的儿童将参加一系列活动，并将接受采访，以确定他们可以就这些活动报告什么。三个月后，父母将给孩子们读一个故事，其中包括孩子们经历过的事件和他们没有经历过的事件的描述。然后，孩子们将接受两次分步访谈，其中非暗示性问题之后是引导性问题，以及一系列具体要求孩子区分他们经历的事件和他们只听到描述的事件的问题。因为访谈过程产生了关于个体在回忆、遗忘、默认（即对建议说“是”）和来源监控（即区分来自多个来源的记忆）方面的差异的信息，这些数据将是构建一个系统理论的第一步，该理论负责易受暗示性发展变化的因素。该项目将实现以下目标：(a)追踪易受父母提供的虚假信息影响的发展趋势；(b)评估在不同程度的提示下，由采访程序引起的虚假报告的类型；(c)评价在回忆、默许和记忆源监测方面的发育变化；(d)测试各种因果模型的充分性，这些模型具体说明了这些过程对儿童易受暗示的贡献。所得数据将对如何进行虐待儿童指控的调查产生重要影响，并将有助于制定面谈程序，以更充分地检验关于儿童报告来源的其他假设。＊＊＊

9409231 POOLE This project will use a powerful new suggestibility manipulation to examine several important issues concerning the strengths and weaknesses of children as witnesses. The technique, an analog of parental involvement in false allegations of abuse, is fully piloted and involves no deception. In Phase 1, children between the ages of 3 and 8 years will participate in a series of events and will be interviewed to determine what they can report about those events. Three months later, parents will read the children a story that includes descriptions of events the children had experienced and events they had not experienced. The children will then be reinterviewed on two occasions with a stepwise procedure in which nonsuggestive questions are followed by leading questions and a series of questions that specifically ask the children to distinguish between events they experienced and events they only heard described. Because the interview procedures yield information about individual differences in recall, forgetting, acquiescence (i.e., saying "yes" to a suggestion), and source monitoring (i.e., distinguishing between memories from several sources), these data will be a first step in constructing a systematic theory of the factors responsible for developmental changes in suggestibility. This project will accomplish the following goals: (a) trace developmental trends in susceptibility to false information provided by parents; (b) evaluate the types of false reports that are elicited by interview procedures with varying degrees of prompting; (c) evaluate developmental changes in recall, acquiescence, and memory source monitoring; and (d) test the adequacy of various causal models that specify the contributions of these processes to children's suggestibility. The resulting data will have important implications for how investigations of child abuse allegations are conducted, and will contribute to the development of interview procedures that more adequat ely test alternative hypotheses about the sources of children's reports. ***