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Full-Text Articles in Child Psychology
26. “How Did You Feel?”: Increasing Child Sexual Abuse Witnesses’ Production Of Evaluative Information., Thomas D. Lyon, Nicholas Scurich, Karen Choi, Sally Handmaker, Rebecca Blank
26. “How Did You Feel?”: Increasing Child Sexual Abuse Witnesses’ Production Of Evaluative Information., Thomas D. Lyon, Nicholas Scurich, Karen Choi, Sally Handmaker, Rebecca Blank
Thomas D. Lyon
In child sexual abuse cases, the victim’s testimony is essential, because the victim and the perpetrator tend to be the only eyewitnesses to the crime. A potentially important component of an abuse report is the child’s subjective reactions to the abuse. Attorneys may ask suggestive questions or avoid questioning children about their reactions, assuming that children, given their immaturity and reluctance, are incapable of articulation. We hypothesized that How questions referencing reactions to abuse (e.g., “howdid you feel”) would increase the productivity of children’s descriptions of abuse reactions. Two studiescompared the extent to which children provided evaluative content, defined as …