Practicing ground rule instructions assists adults in reporting experienced events

Abstract

The present study explored the effect of ground rules when adult interviewees described personally experienced events. Participants (N = 117) in two age groups (18–40 and 60+ years) were interviewed about a meaningful event. They received no ground rules (control), the ‘Don’t Know’, ‘Don’t Understand’ and ‘Correct Me’ rules as statements, or the rules along with practice questions for each. Participants were asked questions during the interview that required them to invoke a ground rule. Practicing the ground rules reduced acquiescence to problematic questions compared to the control group for all three rules. Younger and older adults showed differentiated patterns in performance across different ground rule types. The present research adds to the body of literature supporting the use of ground rules with adults by extending the generalizability of prior work with circumstances paralleling real-world interviewing contexts (i.e. when participants report about a personally experienced event after longer delays).