Questioning the questioning of children: The effect of questions on children's verbal responses

The present thesis consists of multiple studies examining children's response tendencies toward yes-no questions. The first chapter serves as a synopsis of past and current research regarding the questioning of young children. Chapter 2 consists of a set of 4 studies that can be found in Child Development (2003). These studies investigate whether children between the ages of 2 and 5 years display a response bias in their answers to yes-no questions regarding both familiar (e.g. cup) and unfamiliar (e.g. fuse) objects. Chapter 3 consists of two follow-up studies that further investigate response tendencies toward yes-no questions by asking about expected and unexpected actions performed with various objects. Chapter 4 provides a general discussion, which brings together all of the findings from the present project with those from the existing literature. Results from these studies suggest that young children do, in fact, display a response bias when answering yes-no questions. Specifically, there were 5 overall findings: (1) Younger children displayed a greater tendency to answer yes-no questions in a biased manner than did older children; (2) biased responses were generally augmented in conditions where questions concerned unfamiliar/unexpected objects/actions; (3) a greater tendency toward providing biased response was found when children were faced with questions containing incomprehensible words; (4) the frequency of biased responses was amplified when children were forced to rely on their memory of their interaction with the experimenter (i.e. after a delay was implemented); and finally, (5) very few "I don't know" or "other" responses were given. In addition, it was hypothesized that more children would provide "I don't know" or "other" responses after the 1-week delay, but this was not found to be the case. Results indicate that the use of yes-no questions in both the investigative interview and the developmental research setting should only be used when absolutely necessary. Implications are discussed.