The effect of repeated questioning on children's accuracy and consistency in eyewitness testimony
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose. In police interviews children may be asked the same question many times. We investigated how the number of repetitions and the interval between those repetitions affected the accuracy and consistency of children's responses. Methods. 156 children aged 4–9 years watched a staged event and were interviewed individually 1 week later. Children were asked eight open‐ended questions, which were each repeated a further four times (making a total of forty questions). Half these open‐ended questions could be answered from information in the event, and half were unanswerable (so children should have said ‘don't know’ in response to these questions). The questions were repeated in gist form. The interval between an initial question and its repetitions was varied by use of other questions and twenty non‐repeated filler questions. The intervals between repetitions were immediate repetition, repetition after a delay of three intervening questions, after a delay of six intervening questions, and after ten or more intervening questions. Results. Over a quarter of children's responses to repeated questions changed, usually resulting in a decline in accuracy, particularly after the first repetition. Subsequently, the number of repetitions and delay interval had little effect on responses to answerable questions although accuracy to unanswerable questions continued to decline. Conclusions. Question repetition had a negative affect on children's consistency and accuracy. For unanswerable questions in particular, the more often a question was repeated the more likely children were to invent a response.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".