The quality of details when children and youths with intellectual disabilities are interviewed about their abuse experiences

The focus of the present study was to learn more about how children and youths with intellectual disabilities are able to describe their experiences of abuse in real forensic interviews. We explored the quality of details when 33 children and youths with intellectual disabilities were interviewed about their abuse experiences. Their chronological ages were between 5.3 and 22 years (M = 12.9 years) when the last incident of abuse occurred. Unfortunately, few invitations and a large number of directive and option-posing questions were asked. Moreover, the children tended to agreed with option-posing and suggestive statements. Despite very few invitations being asked they elicited significantly longer responses compared to the other question types.