Child witnesses with mild intellectual disabilities are as reliable as other children with the same mental age, research from Victoria University of Wellington has found.

Child witnesses with mild intellectual disabilities are as reliable as other children with the same mental age, research from Victoria University of Wellington has found.

The research, conducted by Dr Deirdre Brown from Victoria’s School of Psychology, Professor Charlie Lewis from Lancaster University and Professor Michael Lamb from the University of Cambridge, examined the performance of 196 children of different ages, as well as different mental ages.

They found early, open-ended interviews best for child witnesses, says Dr Brown.

“All the children in our study, regardless of their intellectual abilities, recalled more information more accurately after six months if they had first been interviewed after only a short delay. Also, open-ended questioning produced higher-quality recall than did a more focussed style of questioning that some professionals adopt when they interact with a child with intellectual disability.”

The children with mild intellectual disability—those whose mental functioning was lower than 97 percent of the population—typically had poorer recall than children of the same actual age, but were as capable as children of the same mental age.

“Their performance almost invariably matched that of children of the same mental or developmental age,” says Dr Brown. “This was true with regard both to details about the event and to how they answered leading or misleading questions that might be used in legal cross-examination. The narrative quality of their storytelling was also comparable.”

The study also showed children with more severe ‘moderate’ disability (those whose cognitive functioning was lower than 99.9 percent of the population) had poorer recall than children of the same mental age.

“All the children we interviewed responded more accurately to broad open-ended questions than to narrow, focussed questions and were able to provide relevant information in response to them,” says Dr Brown. “This was just as true for children with moderate intellectual disabilities, but they struggled to provide fuller information.”

This demonstrates the importance of knowing a child’s developmental or mental age before they are interviewed, says Dr Brown.

“Investigators often lack this information. Studies show that disabilities are often neither recognised nor documented and that judges, for example, often don’t modify their questioning to take disabilities into account.

“We think it is important that investigators know a child’s developmental or mental age before interviews so that they can tailor questions appropriately, assess testimony realistically and act confidently on the evidence.”

This study was published in the July/August 2015 issue of Child Development, and recently featured on the Child and Family Blog, an international collaboration sponsored by Princeton University and University of Cambridge and funded by the Jacobs Foundation.

Contact:

Phone:

Email: