Abstract
In recent years, increasing efforts have been focused on testing strategies of improving victimized children’s narrative productivity, given that, for many youth, finding out what has happened to them is crucial to intervening and promoting their well-being. Implicit encouragement strategies, such as back channeling by conversational partners, have shown some preliminary promise, but their precise effects on productivity and accuracy have not been adequately examined. In this study, 98 youth, ages 8–14, completed a laboratory-based stressful activity, and a week later, a surprise memory test regarding what happened in the lab activity. Interviewers varied their use of implicit encouragement. Open-ended recall questions asked youth about both factual details and detail about their feelings and thoughts during the laboratory activity. Implicit encouragement increased the amount of both types of details and had no effect on errors. In fact, few youth provided any incorrect information in their recall reports. Neither age nor stress was related to youth’s productivity or accuracy, directly or in conjunction with implicit encouragement. Results highlight the value of interviewers using encouraging behaviors when questioning children and adolescents to elicit a range of information about prior stressful experiences.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Amy Castro, Bahara Baghkhanian, Alexander Barron, Joanna Ho, Long Hai Hoang, Loreign Manalo, Michael Kim, Cheyenne Porcella, Lauren Robles, and Steven Schwartz for their help recruiting families, collecting data, and coding narratives.
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This study was funded by NICHD R01 87685 and NSF DLS 1228638.
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Quas, J.A., Dickerson, K.L. Implicit Encouragement: Enhancing Youth Productivity when Recounting a Stressful Experience. Int. Journal on Child Malt. 2, 239–254 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42448-019-00031-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42448-019-00031-8