Citation

Lamb ME, Sternberg KJ, Esplin PW. Child Dev. 2000; 71(6): 1586-1596.

Affiliation

Section on Social and Emotional Development, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA. Michael_Lamb@nih.gov

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

11194258

Abstract

A total of 145 children of 4 to 5, 6 to 7, 8 to 9, and 10 to 12 years of age were interviewed within 3 days, 1 month, 1 to 3 months, or 5 to 14 months after allegedly experiencing a single incident of sexual abuse. The proportion of substantive investigative utterances eliciting new details from the children increased with age and decreased after delays of more than 1 month. Age (but not delay) was also associated with the length and richness of informative responses to individual investigative utterances of all types. Children were more likely to provide new details in response to option-posing and suggestive prompts. As in previous field studies, interviewers employed few open-ended prompts, and thus only 5% of the information obtained was elicited using free-recall prompts.

Language: en