The MRCI with juvenile detainees: optimizing performance or emphasizing ecological validity?

The Miranda Rights Comprehension Instruments (MRCI) are intended to be administered to legally involved youths in a setting free from distractions and stressors with the explicit goal of assessing the examinee's best understanding. However, marked disparities have been observed between juveniles' MRCI performance and their unassisted recall of a representative Miranda warning. We hypothesized that youths' very strong MRCI performance might be partially due to prompts and clarifications used whenever incomplete or ambiguous answers are provided. In this archival study, we systematically re-scored three MRCI instruments from 231 legally involved youths to evaluate their original responses (i.e., non-queried scoring). This approach is viewed as more ecologically valid because actual Miranda warnings are typically provided in a routine manner without assistance following each Miranda component. For the large majority of legally involved juveniles, only small differences were noted between standard and non-queried scoring. However, some dramatic decrements were observed, especially on the Comprehension of Miranda Rights-II (CMR-II). More specifically, 15.7% of CMR-II percentiles dropped precipitously by 60% or more, when using the non-queried scores. The results are discussed within the context of optimized performances versus ecological validity as applied to Miranda evaluations.