Children's Recall and the Cognitive Interview: Do the Positive Effects Hold over Time?

The article discussed how a longer amount of time passing before an interview leads to less correct information/more incorrect information being reported. A shorter delay time to the interview correlates with more correct information being reported. According to previous research conducted by Memon et al. (1993), children using the cognitive interview (CI) vs. the standard interview (SI) had no noticeable difference in accuracy or error rates, and the time before the interview had no effect. However, Flin et al. (1992) found that young children recall slightly less than older children and adults. More specifically, the error rate increased over time but no differences were found regarding interview technique.
The article’s present study consisted of children watching a film and after 7 days half of the children were interviewed either using the cognitive interview or using the structured interview. The other half of the children were interviewed again after 6 months using either of the interviewing techniques (CI or SI). The results showed that the children in the CI condition reported much more correct information than those in the SI condition. The children who were interviewed with the shorter delay period of 7 days reported more correct information than those who had the longer delay period of 6months. Lastly, the children who were interviewed at 6months reported more confabulations. Many of the statistics in this article were confusing to me but the discussion helped clarify. I thought it was very interesting to learn that the children in the CI condition, who were interviewed after 6months, recalled just about the same amount of correct information as did the children from the SI condition who were interviewed only 7 days after. This shows me that there is something special about the CI no matter what the interview delay time is.