Increasing maltreated and nonmaltreated children’s honesty about a minor transgression

• In Event: 3-031 - Children's Honesty

Integrative Statement

The identification of strategies to increase children’s honesty is an important practical and theoretical issue. Maltreated children’s reluctance to disclose abuse presents major challenges for intervention. Professionals need methods for uncovering truth that do not undermine the quality and credibility of children’s reports. Theoretically, the efficacy of various truth induction strategies helps to elucidate specific areas of social and moral development that motivate children’s lie-telling behavior (e.g, fear of punishment, moral obligations).

The present study aimed to examine the efficacy of three truth induction strategies in a sample of 285 4-9- year-old maltreated and nonmaltreated children. Participants took part in a laboratory play session during which they experienced a minor transgression (i.e., a toy breakage) with an admonishment to keep it a secret. Following the play session children were interviewed with the use of three truth induction strategies: (1) use of back-channel utterances (e.g.,hmm-mm), (2) whether the child promised to tell the truth, (3) whether the interviewer added a putative confession (“The lady who came in here told me everything that happened and she wants you to tell the truth. So tell me everything that happened while I was gone).

To examine the effect of each truth induction strategy (as well as the influence of age and maltreatment) on children’s disclosures we conducted a binary logistic regression with maltreatment status (maltreated, nonmaltreated), age (in years), back-channel utterances (back-channel utterances, no back-channel utterances), promise (promise, no promise), and incremental putative confession (putative confession, no putative confession) entered as predictors. All possible two-way interactions were entered into the model. The use of back-channel utterances failed to increase truthful disclosures (Wald = .81, p = .37, OR = .79 (95% CI: .48, 1.31). The promise to tell the truth increased truthful disclosures, but only among nonmaltreated children (Wald = 5.40, p = .02, OR = 3.65 (95% CI: 1.23, 10.90). Among children who were asked to promise to tell the truth 50% truthfully disclosed, whereas 31% of children in the control group truthfully disclosed. In contrast, the incremental putative confession increased disclosure among both maltreated and non-maltreated children, eliciting disclosures from about half of the children who had failed to disclose.

To assess the effect on productivity we conducted a series of univariate generalized linear models (GLMs) on the number of details about broken and unbroken toy play children provided during recall. Effects of maltreatment, age, back-channel utterances, and the promise were examined. The model did not include the putative confession because it was administered at the end of recall. Productivity increased with age, and only back-channel utterances increased productivity (F (1, 281) = 4.13, p = .04, ηp = 0.02).

The results highlight the difficulty of eliciting truthful disclosures about a minor transgression from children. Back-channel utterances increased the productivity of disclosures, but failed to increase truthful disclosures itself. The failure of the promise to influence maltreated children, coupled with the putative confession’s efficacy, suggests that those seeking the truth from children may need to adjust their strategies for encouraging honesty when questioning children about wrongdoing.

Authors

• Kelly McWilliams, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
  Presenting Author

• Stacia Stolzenberg, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Shanna Williams, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author

• Thomas Lyon, University of Southern California
  Non-Presenting Author