Child eyewitness testimony Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Child eyewitness testimony - Research Paper Example Six to eight year olds’ testimonies have also been proven vulnerable to suggestion. These researches help with the obtaining of accurate information from children, without pressuring them in any way. Goodman and his colleagues studied the link between abused children and their eyewitness testimonies while considering a few other factors. They split children with similar backgrounds, abused and non-abused, into the age groups of three to six and seven to ten year olds. The children were paired up according to common factors like their age, gender, abuse status etc. The first part of the experiment was that the children were paired with a stranger (with whom they were encouraged to engage) and then busied in things like reading, photography or blowing bubbles. After a two week interval, an interview was conducted, questioning the children about the various aspects of the social-interaction and asked fallacious questions about the play session. Then the memory and vulnerability of the abused and non-abused children was compared. The group’s initial prognosis was that the older children would have more confident recollections; the non-abused would have display a higher aptitude than the abused children and that an abused child would be easier to influence and his memory more imprecise. From the experiment, the researchers established the older children’s recollection to be more precise and detailed. Age had little impact on the boys’ answers but it was an effecting factor for the girls. The younger girls were inaccurate in comparison to the older girls and the younger boys. The younger boys were found to have the best accounts. However, older children in general gave more noncommittal responses than the younger ones and abused boys gave more noncommittal responses than non-abused boys. The influencing agents in the precision of recollections, age, gender and abuse status, were interconnected. Younger non-abused boys had