The Effects of Repeated Interviewing on Children’s Forensic Statements of Sexual Abuse IRIT HERSHKOWITZ * and ANAT TERNER University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel SUMMARY Multiple interviews with children alleging sexual abuse are not uncommon. Researchers expressed concern that repeated investigations may create and preserve inaccurate details. However, studies indicated that repeated open-ended interviews are not necessarily harmful and may have advantages. Forensic interviews were conducted with 40 children, alleged victims of sexual abuse, according to the NICHD investigative protocol. The children were re-interviewed after a short break. The information obtained in the second interview was almost 25% new. The first interview yielded a larger number of details, both central and peripheral, but the proportion of central details was larger in the second interview. The proportion of details repeated in both interviews was surprisingly low, and most of the original information was not included. Older children repeated more information than younger ones. The data suggest that a repeated forensic interview may elicit new information and preserve central details. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Multiple interviews with children alleging sexual abuse are not uncommon. Alleged victims are likely to go through more than 10 formal investigative interviews during the forensic process (Gray, 1993; McGough, 1993), and informal interviews with parents or friends are probably even more frequent. Laboratory experimental research has focused on the cognitive effects of repeated interviews with children in an attempt to understand the implications for repeated investigations with child eyewitnesses, for example victims of sexual abuse. To date no study has directly explored the effects of multiple investigations on children’s forensic statements of sexual abuse. The present study explores the dynamics of repeated investigations with 40 children, alleged victims of sexual abuse. The dynamics of repeated interviews was investigated mostly in suggestibility studies. These studies established that a combination of repeated interviews with leading, suggestive or coercive questions can cause serious harm to children’s memory and increase the amount of false information in their reports (see Quas, Goodman, Ghetti, & Redlich, 2000). Researchers expressed concern that repeated interviews in forensic contexts may create and preserve inaccurate details, support wrong hypotheses and cause inconsistencies between the multiple statements (Warren & Lane, 1995). Therefore experts strongly recommended to decrease as much as possible the number of forensic interviews with children. However, when the effects of repeated interviews were separated from the effects of suggestive practices several studies showed that repeated interviews were not APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (in press) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1319 *Correspondence to: Irit Hershkowitz, School of Social Work, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel. E-mail: irith@research.haifa.ac.il Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.