Enhancing children's narratives in investigative interviews

OBJECTIVE: To illustrate the amount of detail that can be elicited from alleged abuse victims using open-ended prompts by closely examining forensic interviews of a 5-year-old and a 15-year-old. METHOD: Interview prompts in the substantive sections of two forensic interviews were characterized as invitations, cued invitations. directive or option-posing, and the number of details they each elicited was tabulated. RESULTS: In both interviews, open-ended prompts predominated and were distributed throughout the substantive phases of the interviews. Most of the information obtained was elicited using open-ended prompts, which remained equivalently effective throughout the interviews. Reconstruction of the children's accounts illustrated how successive prompts continued to elicit information. CONCLUSION: Well-framed open-ended prompts, including those that use details provided by the child as cues, elicit narrative accounts from children of all ages. Because such information is more likely to be accurate, investigators are urged to rely more extensively on open-ended prompts.