Interviewer Rapport May Buffer the Negative Impact of Distress on Timing of Children’s Disclosures

• In Event: Improving Eyewitness Reporting: Novel Approaches Across Development

Abstract

Children’s maltreatment disclosures are important for accurately identifying and prosecuting perpetrators of abuse. Correlational research examining forensic interviewer rapport-building (i.e., techniques that build trust and familiarity with the interviewer) suggests that rapport, broadly speaking, may improve the accuracy and completeness of children’s disclosure and alleviate their distress during the interview process. However, experimental work is needed to systematically compare how different rapport strategies may impact how readily children disclose and whether transgression-related distress may influence the effectiveness of rapport on disclosures. The present study experimentally manipulated interviewer rapport techniques to better understand how rapport strategies interact with children’s distress about a standardized transgression event to predict disclosure timing.

A preliminary sample of 104 ethnically-diverse 5- to 12-year-olds (Mage = 8.25, SD = 2.33) played an online game with a confederate wherein two of seven computer toys they played with appeared to “break” and children were encouraged to keep the breakage a secret. Next, a trained interviewer questioned children using an adapted version of the NICHD interview protocol (Lamb et al., 2007) and rapport strategies aligning with one of three randomly assigned conditions: no rapport attempted (No Rapport), a pre-interview rapport-building conversation (Pre-Rapport), or a pre-interview rapport-building conversation plus rapport throughout the interview (Continued Rapport). Children then answered one question (“How worried were you about getting in trouble for what happened with the game?”) to assess their distress about repercussions following the breakage event. Children’s disclosure timing was calculated as the number of interviewer prompts it took for the child to disclose a toy breakage. We hypothesized that, on average, children would disclose earlier in the Pre-Rapport and Continued Rapport conditions compared to the No Rapport condition. We also expected that the rapport techniques used in the Pre-Rapport and especially the Continued Rapport conditions would buffer the negative effect of distress on timing of disclosure.

Most children (91%) disclosed the transgression, although the timing of disclosure unexpectedly did not vary by condition, p > .05. In addition, distress predicted later disclosure in the No Rapport condition only. That is, distressed children in the No Rapport condition disclosed approximately seven prompts later than those in the Pre-Rapport, B = -6.98, SE = 0.29, p = .018 and the Continued Rapport conditions, B = -7.12, SE = 3.20, p = .029, ΔR2 = .06 (see Figure 1).

While none of the rapport strategies predicted a uniform shift in children’s disclosure timing, for children who did not receive rapport-building techniques, higher distress was associated with delayed disclosures. These findings suggest that rapport-building may be particularly beneficial for eliciting early disclosures from children who are highly distressed about a negative event, likely because rapport fosters trust and comfort amongst conversational partners. This work has implications for parents, teachers, and legal professionals who strive to elicit timely disclosures from children with the goal of promoting healthy development.

Authors

• Emily Slonecker, Cabrini University
  Presenting Author

• Joanna Peplak, University of California - Irvine

• J. Zoe Klemfuss, University of California - Irvine