“Were any of my Questions Silly?”: Children’s Recognition of Unanswerable Questions

• In Event: Learning and memory in childhood

Abstract

When children are interviewed across contexts (e.g., research, forensic), it is important that they indicate when they do not understand a question. Research demonstrates that children will answer bizarre or unanswerable questions like “What do feet have for breakfast?” rather then saying “I’m not sure” or “I don’t understand,” even though they can later correctly identify such questions as “silly” (Waterman et al., 2000, 2001, 2004). This past research focused on younger children (6- to 8-years-old) and did not examine the impact of interview instructions (e.g., reminding children to inform an interviewer when they do not understand a question) on their ability to recognize questions as challenging.

In the current research, we examined whether child age and receiving reminders of a commonly introduced ground rule affected children’s recognition of unanswerable questions. We introduced 81 children (6- to 11-years-old) to a randomly assigned “I Don’t Understand” Ground Rule Reminder Condition (No Reminder vs. Two Reminders to say “I don’t understand” if needed) and asked them 23 scripted questions, 8 of which were “tricky” and required clarification (e.g., “How did the girl use the glorp on her cut?”). Finally, we asked, “Were any of my questions silly?” to examine whether children could identify that we included some tricky questions.

Children’s responses to tricky questions were coded dichotomously for whether they requested clarification. Children’s responses to the “Were any of my questions silly” question were coded into one of five categories: (1) No, (2) Yes, (3) I don’t understand, (4) I don’t know, or (5) Other (e.g., “Maybe”). Descriptive statistics concerning children’s clarification requests and responses to our “Silly” question are presented, and a logistic regression assessed children’s yes/no responses to the “Silly” question.

Nearly all children (n = 79, 97.5%) requested clarification to at least one tricky question. Approximately half of the children (51.9%, n = 42) said “no,” indicating our questions were not silly. The remaining children said “yes” (32.1%, n = 26), “I don’t understand” (3.7%, n = 3), “I don’t know” (6.2%, n = 5), or Other (6.2%, n = 5). A logistic regression examining children’s “yes” and “no” responses tested the effects of Age and Reminder Condition on whether children (n = 68) recognized interview questions as “silly.” Results revealed a significant model, X² (2) = 8.344, p = .015, Nagelkerke R² = .157. As age increased, so did children’s likelihood of recognizing some of the interview questions as “silly”. Older children (9- to 11-year-olds; 88.1% yes) were 3.79 times more likely to recognize some of the interview questions as “silly” than younger children (6- to 8-year-olds; 25.0%% yes) (95% CI = 1.31, 10.97). Reminders that children could say “I don’t understand” had no significant effect on children’s claims regarding the silliness of our interview questions.

Despite the overwhelming majority of children requesting clarification at least once to a tricky question, roughly half of the children did not identify the tricky questions as “silly.” Older children performed better than younger children, yielding insights into children’s metacognitive development.

Authors

• Lillian A Rodriguez Steen, The College of Saint Rose
  Presenting Author

• Erin T. Mattes, Ontario Tech University

• Sydney D. Spyksma, Ontario Tech University

• Lindsay C Malloy, University of Ontario Institute of Technology