Rapport: Little effect on children’s, adolescents’, and adults’ statement quantity, accuracy, and suggestibility

DOI

Rapport building is widely recommended in eyewitness interview situations and is a critical component in some interview protocols. However, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of rapport building on memory performance is scant. The current experiment examined the effects of different levels of rapport (none, minimal, extensive) on children’s, adolescents’, and adults’ memory (N = 229). Participants viewed a video of a mock theft and received one of three possible rapport manipulations. They then provided a free narrative of what they had seen, followed by 18 cued (suggestive and nonsuggestive) questions. In general, we found limited evidence of positive effects of rapport building on statement quantity and accuracy across age groups. Adolescents did profit more from extensive rapport building compared to no rapport. In line with the idea of a linear development of memory measures with age, adolescents generally fell in-between the other two age groups across different memory measures. The current study encourages systematic experimental research on the effect of rapport building on eyewitness memory.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/F08TYS
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1080/15379418.2018.1509759
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/F08TYS
Provenance
Creator Sauerland, Melanie ORCID logo; Brackmann, Nathalie ORCID logo; Otgaar, Henry ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Sauerland, Melanie; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2019
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Sauerland, Melanie (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav
Size 9544
Version 1.1
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences