The Video Suggestibility Scale for Children

The Video Suggestibility Scale for Children: how generalizable is children's performance to other measures of suggestibility?
McFarlane F, Powell MB.School of Psychology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, 3125, Australia.

This study explored the generalizability of the Video Suggestibility Scale for Children (VSSC), which was developed by Scullin and colleagues (Scullin & Ceci, 2001; Scullin & Hembrooke, 1998) as a tool for discriminating among children (aged three to five years) who have different levels of suggestibility. The VSSC consists of two subscales; Yield (a measure of children's willingness to acquiesce to misleading questions) and Shift (a measure of children's tendency to change their responses after feedback from the interviewer). Children's (N = 77) performance on each of the subscales was compared with their performance using several other measures of suggestibility. These measures included children's willingness to assent to a false event as well as the number of false interviewer suggestions and false new details that the children provided when responding to cued-recall questions about an independent true-biased and an independent false (non-experienced) event. An independent samples t-test revealed that those children who assented to the false event generated higher scores on the Yield measure. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that Yield was a significant predictor of the number of false details reported about the false activity, but not the true-biased activity. There was no significant relationship between the Shift subscale and any of the dependent variables. The potential contribution of the VSSC for forensic researchers and practitioners is discussed. Copyright 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Child Abuse Negl. 1993 Jul-Aug;17(4):477-85.
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· Child Abuse Negl. 1994 Oct;18(10):885-7.