Do we need to rethink guidance on repeated interviews?

Within the legal system, children are frequently interviewed about their experiences more than once, with different information elicited in different interviews. The presumed positive and negative effects of multiple interviewing have generated debate and controversy within the legal system and among researchers. Some commentators emphasise that repeated interviews foster inaccurate recall and are inherently suggestive, whereas others emphasise the benefits of allowing witnesses more than one opportunity to recall information. In this article we briefly review the literature on repeated interviewing before presenting a series of cases highlighting what happens when children are interviewed more than once for various reasons. We conclude that, when interviewers follow internationally recognised best-practice guidelines emphasising open-questions and free memory recall, alleged victims of abuse should be interviewed more than once to ensure that more complete accounts are obtained. Implications for current legal guidelines concerning repeated interviewing are discussed

Growing up in rural Scotland

Sweep 1 of GUS provides some evidence that children in rural areas may be more likely to live in favourable socio-economic circumstances than their urban counterparts. This is associated with greater exposure to positive parental behaviours, such as breastfeeding, among rural babies. However, in many other respects the early experiences of children in urban and rural areas in terms of service use, health problems and contact with significant others are not very different. Moreover, other evidence suggests that families in rural areas may be relatively disadvantaged in respect of easy access to ante-natal classes and having grandparents living nearby, for example

Can paraphrasing increase the amount and accuracy of reports from child eyewitnesses?

Young children’s descriptions of sexual abuse are often sparse thus creating the need for techniques that elicit lengthier accounts. ‘Paraphrasing’, or repeating information children have just disclosed, is a technique sometimes used by forensic interviewers to clarify or elicit information. (e.g., if a child stated “He touched me”, an interviewer could respond “He touched you?”). However, the effects of paraphrasing have yet to be scientifically assessed. The impact of different paraphrasing styles on young children’s reports was investigated. Overall, paraphrasing per se did not improve the length, richness, or accuracy of reports when compared to open-ended prompts such as “tell me more,” but some styles of paraphrasing were more beneficial than others. The results provide clear recommendations for investigative interviewers about how to use paraphrasing appropriately, and which practices can compromise the quality of children’s reports

Children Develop a Veil of Fairness

Previous research suggests that children develop an increasing concern with fairness over the course of development. Research with adults suggests that the concern with fairness has at least two distinct components: a desire to be fair but also a desire to signal to others that they are fair. We explore whether children’s developing concern with behaving fairly towards others may in part reflect a developing concern with appearing fair to others. In Experiments 1-2, most 6- to 8-year-old children behaved fairly towards others when an experimenter was aware of their choices; fewer children opted to behave fairly, however, when they could be unfair to others yet appear fair to the experimenter. In Experiment 3, we explored the development of this concern with appearing fair by using a wider age range (6- to 11-year-olds) and a different method. In this experiment, children chose how to assign a good or bad prize to themselves and another participant by either unilaterally deciding who would get each prize or by using a fair procedure – flipping a coin in private. Older children were much more likely to flip the coin than younger children, yet were just as likely as younger children to assign themselves the good prize by reporting winning the coin flip more than chance would dictate. Overall, the results of these experiments suggest that as children grow older they become increasingly concerned with appearing fair to others, which may explain some of their increased tendency to behave fairly

Effect of Alaska Fiscal Options On Children and Families

Alaska’s state government faces an unprecedented challenge, with the need to close an estimated $3 billion gap between projected revenues and expenditures in fiscal year 2017. Total unrestricted state General Fund revenue in fiscal year 2016 (the 12 months ending June 30, 2016) was$1.3 billion, or about $1,800 per resident. That was barely more than the state dispenses annually to Alaska school districts, to support public education (Alaska Office of Management and Budget, Enacted Fiscal Summary). Despite low oil prices and declining production, petroleum revenues still accounted for 72 percent of these funds (Alaska Revenue Sources Book, Fall 2016, Alaska Department of Revenue, Tax Division). Alaska is the only state that does not have either state income or sales taxes. It is clear that Alaskans will soon have to accept some form of broad-based revenue measure to enable continued funding of basic public services. A 2016 analysis by ISER researchers discussed the potential effects on Alaska’s economy and households of various options to reduce expenditures and increase revenues.1 That study examined how the effects of revenue measures varied for Alaska households with different levels of income. These same revenue measures and expenditure cuts are also likely to have a much bigger effect on some households than others, depending on the presence and number of children in the family. This study extends the previous analysis by specifically examining how different options would be likely to affect families and children. Many large expenditures in the state budget can easily be identified as specifically benefiting children. These include state-funded programs such as the Alaska Public School Foundation program and the Division of Juvenile Justice and Office of Children’s Services, for example, as well as joint federal-state programs such as Medicaid and Denali Kidcare. Less obvious are the effects on children of potential measures to fund these and other state expenditures. This study focuses on describing and quantifying the effects of alternative state revenue options on Alaska families and children. In addition to considering how the revenue measures might affect families with children compared to households without children, we also consider how the burden of each measure might differ for rural and urban families.National Science Foundation Alaska Children's Trust UA Strategic Investment FUnd

Production of relative clauses in monolingual Turkish children

Research on the production of relative clauses (RCs) has shown that in English, although children start using intransitive RCs at an earlier age, more complex, bi-propositional object RCs appear later (Hamburger & Crain, 1982; Diessel and Tomasello, 2005), and children use resumptive pronouns both in acceptable and unacceptable ways (McKee, McDaniel, & Snedeker, 1998; McKee & McDaniel, 2001). To date, it is unclear whether or not the same picture emerges in Turkish, a language with an SOV word-order and overt case marking. Some studies suggested that subject RCs are more frequent in adults and children (Slobin, 1986) and yield a better performance than object RCs (Özcan, 1996), but others reported the opposite pattern (Ekmekçi, 1990). Our study addresses this issue in Turkish children and adults, and uses participants’ errors to account for the emerging asymmetry between subject and object RCs. 37 5-to-8 year old monolingual Turkish children and 23 adult controls participated in a novel elicitation task involving cards, each consisting of four different pictures (see Figure 1). There were two sets of cards, one for the participant and one for the researcher. The former had animals with accessories (e.g., a hat) whereas the latter had no accessories. Participants were instructed to hold their card without showing it to the researcher and describe the animals with particular accessories. This prompted the use of subject and object RCs. The researcher had to identify the animals in her card (see Figure 2). A preliminary repeated measures ANOVA with the factor Group (pre-school, primary-school children) showed no differences between the groups in the use of RCs (p>.1), who were therefore collapsed into one for further analyses. A repeated measures ANOVA with the factors Group (children, adults) and RC-Type (Subject, Object) showed that children used fewer RCs than adults (F(1,58)=7.54, p<.01), and both groups used fewer object than subject RCs (F(1,58)=22.46, p<.001), but there was no Group by RC-Type interaction (see Figure 3). A similar ANOVA on the rate of grammatical RCs showed a main effect of Group (F(1,58)=77.25, p<.001), a main effect of RC-Type (F(1,58)=66.33, p<.001), and an interaction of Group by RC-Type (F(1,58)=64.6, p<.001) (see Figure 4). Children made more errors than adults in object RCs (F(1,58)=87.01, p<.001), and children made more errors in object compared to subject RCs (F(1,36)=106.35, p<.001), but adults did not show this asymmetry. The error analysis revealed that children systematically avoided the object-relativizing morpheme –DIK, which requires possessive agreement with the genitive-marked subject. They also used resumptive pronouns and resumptive full-DPs in the extraction site similarly to English children (see Figure 5). These findings are in line with Slobin (1986) and Özcan (1996). Children’s errors suggest that they avoid morphosyntactic complexity of object RCs and try to preserve the canonical word order by inserting resumptive pronouns in the extraction site. Finally, cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of RCs in typologically different languages suggests a higher accessibility of subject RCs both at the structural (Keenan and Comrie, 1977) and conceptual level (Bock and Warren, 1986)

Access to early childhood education in Australia

This report presents AIFS research undertaken to identify gaps in access to and participation in preschool programs by Australian children in the year before full-time school review how "access" to preschool services is conceptualised and defined; identify the issues and factors that affect access to preschool services; and document and provide recommendations on how access to preschool services can be measured beyond broad performance indicators. To meet these objectives, the publication includes a review of Australian and international literature; results of consultations across Australia; and analyses of participation of children in early childhood education using a number of Australian datasets. The key messages identified by the study included: "Access" to Early Childhood Education (ECE) in Australia is considered to be more than just "participation" in ECE. It should, for example, also cover elements of quality, relevance to children. However, data are not available that would allow measurement against such a broadly defined concept of "access". There are difficulties and limitations in using existing survey and administrative data to measure "access" by "participation" in ECE. Nevertheless these data provide broad indications of ECE participation. Participation rates have the advantage of being easily understood and easily compared over jurisdictions and time. The complexity and variation in how ECE is delivered in Australia has implications for the measurement of access. This is related to different nomenclature used, and varied ages at which children are eligible to attend ECE. The different models of delivery of ECE also complicate the measurement issues, with long day care a widespread provider of ECE in some states/territories, but not others. Given there are difficulties in measuring access, this research used a number of datasets, to provide a fuller understanding of access across Australia. The analyses showed that children missing out on ECE were more often represented among disadvantaged families, and whose children are perhaps in greatest need of ECE to achieve school-readiness. The groups of children who stood out in these analyses as being less likely to be participating in ECE were Indigenous children and children from NESB backgrounds

Property Rights for the Poor: Effects of Land Titling

Secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development. The evaluation of the causal effects of land titling, however, is a difficult task as the allocation of property rights is typically endogenous. We exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles to overcome this identification problem. More than twenty years ago, a group of squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of Buenos Aires. When the Congress passed a law expropriating the land from the former owners with the purpose of entitling it to the occupants, some of the original owners accepted the government compensation, while others are still disputing the compensation payment in the slow Argentine courts. These different decisions by the former owners generated an allocation of property rights that is exogenous in equations describing the behavior of the squatters. We find that entitled families increased housing investment, reduced household size, and improved the education of their children relative to the control group. However, effects on credit access are modest and there are no effects on labor income.

Living with childhood asthma: parental perceptions of risk in the household environment and strategies for coping

Aim To explore parents’ perceptions of environmental household risks to their child’s asthma and to identify the strategies they adopt in relation to these perceived risks. Background The prevalence of childhood asthma is increasing worldwide and especially in the UK. Asthma is more common in areas of socio-economic disadvantage. Household environmental factors have been implicated in some of this increase. A number of factors in the home environment have been found to act as triggers to asthma symptoms, including high humidity levels, poor ventilation, mould, second-hand tobacco smoke and pet allergens. Little is known about how parents, as the main care-givers and decision makers in the home, perceive and cope with the risks posed by these triggers. Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of parents of 32 children with asthma aged 4 to 16 years and living in a socio-economically disadvantaged urban community in the North East of England. Interviews were audiotaped, transcribed verbatim and analysed using constant comparison techniques. Findings All parents were aware of some of the risks their children faced at home. Some appeared to know more than others and coping styles varied. A typology of three groups of parents was identified: those who actively seek advice and adopt clear preventative strategies (preventers); those who minimize the risks and only react when things go wrong (reactors); and those who engage in compensatory activities in an attempt to trade-off between harms and benefits (compensators). The unifying themes underpinning these different styles are that all parents are motivated to maintain normal family life but that they adopt different strategies to achieve this

Is Targeting Deprived Areas an Effective Means to Reach Poor People? An assessment of one rationale for area-based funding programmes

Area-based programmes have long been a feature of urban policy in the UK. One rationale is that they are an effective means to target poor people. Area deprivation indices are used to identify areas for targeting. This paper reviews the different results produced by these indices. It then examines the effectiveness of the current Index of Multiple Deprivation in targeting the poor, demonstrating that area targeting using the IMD 2000 is a more complete way of reaching the poor than has been claimed by opponents of area-based targeting in the past. However, it is more effective in reaching some sub-groups, particularly children, than others, and is also relatively inefficient. There is a trade off between efficiency and completeness. The use of area targeting should depend on the type of intervention, the costs and benefits of producing complex targeting mechanisms, and the particular balance between completeness and efficiency in each case.area targeting, deprivation, area-based initiatives, neighbourhoods