Effects of interviewer role and time delay on children's memory for a uniquely staged familiar event.

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of interview role, specifically non-familiar participant compared to non-familiar non-participant, and children's recall capability for different types of information presented at a unique birthday party. Atypical features, such as trick candles and a stuffed cow party host named Jesse, were mixed with typical expectations of a birthday party. Twenty-four children, ages six through eight years old, attended the party in pairs of two. The party and interviews were video taped and transcribed verbatim. The children were interviewed one week and seven weeks after the event. In both interviews, the children were first asked general, open-ended questions about the party, followed by more specific probes to elicit information. If children did not volunteer the information in response to increasingly specific open-ended questions, they were asked leading/misleading questions requiring a yes or no answer, but only at the end of the seven-week interview. Children reported more features overall to the non-participant interviewer, and although the children were quite accurate in their reports, they were able to recall fewer features during the seven week interview. Recall for atypical features did not appear to prevail over the children's schema based expectations for what should happen at a birthday party. However, recall for atypical violations was exceptional at the open-ended level. Evidence that attention does not focus on atypical disruptions long enough to be strongly encoded was indicated by high incidence of reporting incorrectly to leading and misleading questioning. Omissions were correctly recalled once an open-ended prompt was presented.