Lawyers May Be Eliciting Inaccurate Testimony from Children

A recent research article looked at how lawyers in court questioned children about timing issues.  Prior research has shown that children, particularly young children, struggle to provide accurate estimates of times that things in the past happened.  They do much better with present time questions, such as “how old are you,” but do not do well when asked if something happened “before or after your birthday.”

Children, particularly younger children, also are more likely to give inaccurate responses to forced-choice or “recognition” questions, such as yes-no or today-yesterday.  They tend to pick one of the answers given rather than saying they don’t now or that the correct option is a different one.

The authors of this article reviewed 130 transcripts from court trial to review how attorneys questioned children about when things happened. The researchers found that even prosecutors, who presumably are well-trained, tended to give children recognition questions rather than open-ended questions about times.  When an event happened can be an essential question in a criminal proceeding, so it makes sense that lawyers would question children specifically about times of events.

The problem, according to the researchers, is that the children very rarely said they didn’t know the time.  In other words, the questions combined two factors — time and recognition choices — that research has shown have a high risk of eliciting inaccurate information.  Yet, the children were providing an answer rather than expressing the uncertainty that the research says they usually have.  To quote the researchers, “While we do not know that children are making mistakes on all of these questions, the high rate of recognition questions and the low rate of ‘I don’t know’ responding (especially among the younger children) are suggestive of error given what we know from the developmental literature.”

It’s an interesting and important question that bears more research and review. In the interim, lawyers questioning children should be aware that children do tend to struggle to place events in a timeline, and they provide more accurate information to open-ended questions than forced-choice or “recognition” questions.