Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Legal Implications of Developmental Understanding of Contact

Sullivan, Colleen E, Phoenix AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF), Developmental Sciences, and Law and Science programs. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Thomas Lyon at the University of Southern California, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating children’s understanding of contact. The proposed research seeks to understand how children define contact and how this changes as children mature. Children may initially define contact as something one does with the hand, excluding other forms of contact. We will also assess children’s understanding in response to different types of questions. Researchers often rely on yes-no questions to identify children’s early understanding of concepts, however, children often respond to yes-no questions with an unelaborated “yes” or “no” response. Asking children open-ended follow-up questions may allow children to provide more complete, elaborative responses, enabling us to better understand how they define contact. The proposed research has practical implications for legal investigations. When professionals suspect a crime has occurred, practice guides recommend asking children yes-no questions, but this may lead to underreporting. The findings will advance the field of developmental psychology by helping us understand children’s language development and how different question types can capture children’s understanding of words and improve legal investigations by providing data-driven, age specific recommendations to practitioners about interviewing children. The first aim of the proposed research is to present a novel, rigorous test of children’s developing understanding of contact. We theorize that children exhibit superordinate underextension, in which they understand the basic level meaning of manual contact but not the superordinate level meaning of physical contact. Although underextension of contact has been discussed in the research on children’s reports, researchers have hypothesized a different type of underextension: the availability of a subordinate term leads children to deny that contact occurred. Examining children’s superordinate and subordinate underextension of contact will lead to the first direct, comprehensive examination of 3- to 12-year-olds’ understanding of contact. The second aim of the proposed research is to examine children’s understanding of contact utilizing different question types. In the proposed research, we will ask children open-ended follow-up questions and assess whether this increases elaboration that elucidates how children are defining contact and increases true reports without increasing false reports. The proposed research has practical implications for legal investigations, where children are often asked yes-no questions about contact, despite a paucity of data examining children’s understanding of this basic concept. The proposed research can therefore lead to theory- and data-driven recommendations for questioning children. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.