The utility of generic (“what happens”) and episodic (“what happened”) prompts in eliciting children’s reports of their experiences has been considered in previous research, but not within the context of family law interviews. In the current study, 47 children aged 6 to 10 years old were interviewed about what usually happens (generic) and what happened during a particular event (episodic) during aspects of their daily lives. Interview topics were informed by published guidance on family law interviewing. Children’s parents judged the accuracy of their reports. Interviews were coded for episodic and generic language use, accuracy, refusals to answer questions, uncertainty, informativeness, number of details provided, and the novelty of information provided across the generic and episodic phases. Recall order (episodic-first, generic-first) was counterbalanced but no effects of order were apparent. As predicted, children responded to interviewer questions with congruent language use. Parents judged generic accounts to be partially accurate more frequently, and inaccurate less frequently, than episodic accounts. Children said, “I don’t remember” and indicated uncertainty more often to episodic than generic questions, but younger children’s episodic accounts were more informative than were their generic ones. Conversely, generic accounts contained more total details and more novel details than episodic accounts. Few age differences were observed. The results suggest that there is value in asking children for both generic and episodic information about their daily lives when conducting information-gathering interviews for family law purposes, but that generic prompts may be more productive on the whole.

中文翻译：

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在家庭法背景下，出于决策目的探索一般惯例和特定事件。

在之前的研究中已经考虑了通用（“发生了什么”）和情节（“发生了什么”）提示在引发儿童报告他们的经历方面的效用，但没有在家庭法访谈的背景下考虑过。在当前的研究中，47 名 6 至 10 岁的儿童接受了采访，了解他们日常生活中通常发生的事情（一般）和特定事件（情节）期间发生的事情。采访主题由已发布的家庭法采访指南提供。孩子的父母判断他们报告的准确性。访谈按照情节和通用语言的使用、准确性、拒绝回答问题、不确定性、信息量、提供的细节数量以及跨通用和情节阶段提供的信息的新颖性进行编码。召回顺序（情节优先，通用优先）被抵消，但没有明显的顺序影响。正如预测的那样，孩子们以一致的语言使用来回答面试官的问题。与情节叙述相比，家长认为一般叙述部分准确的频率更高，不准确的频率较低。孩子们说，“我不记得了”，并且比一般问题更频繁地表示对情节的不确定性，但年幼儿童的情节叙述比他们的一般问题提供的信息更多。相反，通用帐户比情节帐户包含更多的总细节和更多新颖的细节。几乎没有观察到年龄差异。结果表明，在为家庭法目的而进行信息收集访谈时，询问儿童有关日常生活的一般信息和插曲信息是有价值的，