UC Irvine

Statements made by children in a range of legal settings can irrevocably impact their family structure, relationships, and living environment. Because these statements can fundamentally alter childrens futures, efforts have been made to identify methods to enhance childrens reports by increasing comprehensiveness, completeness, and accuracy. Interviewer support has broadly been considered a method of interest, but variations in what constitutes support have highlighted the need for greater specificity in documenting how different facets of supportive behaviors relate to childrens reporting tendencies. In this review, we describe work focused on the effects of interviewer support, on childrens memory completeness and accuracy. We then describe to a subset of interviewer behaviors that encourage elaboration in dyadic interactions: back-channeling and vocatives. We present preliminary evidence suggesting that these utterances, referred to as implicit encouragement, can increase the amount of detail provided without compromising accuracy. Implications for custody evaluations are discussed.