The Reliability of Children's Eyewitness Testimonies

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The Reliability of Children's Eyewitness Testimonies

The situation that I have thought of is, when I was on the jury for juveniles who committed first offenses. While I was listening to the lawyers depend these kids, I looked on the list and saw a familiar name. The name was a person I went to kindergarten with. She was being convicted of shoplifting. I could not believe it. All the thoughts of that soft, kind-hearted person went out the window. My behaviors were changed by the environmental influences. My thoughts were overcome with coldness. I felt that she choose her situation. Somewhere along she became part of the wrong crowd and never changed her situation. I also think that the situation changed what I thought of her.

The reliability of children’s eyewitness testimony is a controversial issue. Opinions range from proponents believing that children are virtuous in every detail to those who are more skeptical. In actuality, child testimony falls somewhere in between the two divergent views. Though children may not intend to intentionally distort the truth, they do seem to be very vulnerable to suggestibility. Therefore, certain comments and the form of questions can influence testimonials.

The aim of the research experiment is to explore the conditions under which unbiased leading questions would influence a child’s memory performance. If young children are asked unbiased leading questions, then their memory performance is going to alter the correct answer. The independent variable is age. Age is an important indicator of how children will view their environment. Age is often inextricably associated with available strategies which children may use to aid in their memory performance. The dependent variable is the number of correct answers. Hence, understanding the children’s limitations will help to understand their version of the truth.

A sample of children ranging from 4 to 13 years old are going to be asked to watch a Rainbow Brite video. The children will be randomly picked from a childcare center. To ensure that the children are going to be randomly assigned, the children will range in different age groups. The first group will consist of 4, 6, and 8 year olds. The second group will consist of 10,12, and 14 year olds. It would have to be a field experiment because you have to go out and collect the data.

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