Does type of memory practice matter when interviewing children about a single or repeated event?
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Roberts, Kim
Powell, Martine
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Abstract
In cases of child sexual abuse, the abuse has often occurred on repeated occasions. For example, in a representative sample of 98 children drawn from over 1000 interviews with child sexual abuse victims in Israel, 42% of the 98 cases involved three or more instances of abuse (Lamb, Sternberg, Esplin, Hershkowitz, Orbach & Hovav, 1997). Children’s reports of repeated events are qualitatively different from their reports of novel, single-experience events (see Roberts & Powell, 2001, for a review). While children who have experienced an event multiple times are highly accurate about details that are always the same, they are less accurate about details that change, and confuse these variable details across occurrences (Powell, Roberts, Ceci, & Hembrooke, 1999). Many techniques are currently being researched to help children reduce these between-event confusions (e.g., source-monitoring training studies; Poole & Lindsay, 2001; Thierry & Spence, 2002) because when children testify about a repeated event, they may be required to describe one or two instances with a reasonable amount of precision, such as providing time, place, and the actions that occurred, and thus must be able to discriminate within reason among different occasions (Guadagno, Powell & Wright, 2006; R. v B. (G.), 1990; Roberts, 2002; S v. R, 1989)
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International Investigative Interviewing Research Group Bulletin (iIIRG Bulletin)
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2
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2
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© 2009 iIIRG. The attached file is reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Please refer to the journal's website for access to the definitive, published version.
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Forensic Psychology
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Brubacher, S; Roberts, K; Powell, M, Does type of memory practice matter when interviewing children about a single or repeated event?, International Investigative Interviewing Research Group Bulletin (iIIRG Bulletin), 2009, 2 (2), pp. 10-16