One program of research has involved the development and assessment of techniques for enhancing the informativeness of child witnesses and for evaluating the credibility of their accounts. In collaboration with investigative agencies in the US, UK, and Israel, interviewers elicited higher quality information when they following SSED-designed interview protocols. Use of the NICHD protocol dramatically increased the amount of information retrieved from four- to 13-year-old alleged victims using open-ended prompts, although there were important age differences in the types of information (e.g., regarding temporal context) that children provided. Preliminary analyses also show that young witnesses recall as much information in total, as well as in response to open-ended prompts, as alleged victims do. Alleged suspects who agree to talk provide as much information about their experiences as age mates who are alleged victims. Other field experiments have shown that mental context reinstatement and the introduction of gender-neutral anatomical drawings in the context of protocol-guided interviews both help children provide substantial numbers of additional details about the alleged incidents of abuse. Other non-suggestive techniques for prompting memory retrieval are being evaluated as well. Procedures are being developed to enhance the sensitivity and specificity of the conclusions drawn from investigative interviews and evaluate the strengths and limitations of techniques designed to evaluate children's credibility. Another program of research is concerned with the effects of child and spouse abuse on the development of children and adolescents. In both middle childhood and adolescence, family violence appears to affect the offsprings' views of their parents. Children/adolescents feel less closely attached to parents who have abused them, whereas spouse abuse has no apparent effects on the children's attachments to either parent.
