The effects of repeated questioning on young children's eyewitness testimony

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to explore the conditions under which repeated questions would influence memory performance. Children of five and seven years of age witnessed a staged event and were then individually interviewed with a free‐recall test and closed and open form questions, some of which were repeated in the interview. Some children were warned that questions might be repeated. The older children were more accurate on both open and closed question forms than the younger children. In both groups recall improved upon second questioning with open questions, whereas accuracy of responses deteriorated somewhat upon repetition of closed questions. On the basis of these data it is concluded that if closed questions are repeated in a witness interview it may lead the witness to assume incorrectly that his or her first response was incorrect; however, the findings support the use of repeated questioning as a probe for more information to open‐ended questions.