Difficulties in attorneys' before/after questions in child sexual abuse trials

This exploratory study examined five potential problems with attorneys' questions and 5- to 9-year-old children's responses to before/after questions in 156 child sexual abuse trials. Two problems have received some attention in prior research: the extent to which children were asked to backward sequence through before questions, and order of mention, which considers whether the order in which two events were mentioned in the question matched the order in which the events purportedly occurred. We found that 43% of before/after questions included before, and 55% of questions asking about two events violated order of mention. We also examined three issues involving potential ambiguity that have been overlooked: grain size ambiguity, in which the temporal interval to which before/after refer is unspecified; reference time ambiguity, in which before/after could refer to a prior time or the time when the question is asked; and focal ambiguity, in which the before/after question could be asking about sequence or occurrence. Eighty-four percent of questions exhibited grain size ambiguity, 18% of questions exhibited reference time ambiguity and 40% of questions exhibited focal ambiguity. Overall, 78% of before/after questions were option-posing and 84% of children's responses to those questions were unelaborated, which makes disambiguation of responses difficult. Even when questions were unambiguous, we found suggestive evidence that words used to specify grain size or reference time created other difficulties for children. The results highlight the need for additional research examining difficulties in before/after questions, and for educating attorneys and others who interview children about subtle difficulties.