Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 27, No. 4, August 2003 ( C  2003) Improving Children’s Recall of an Occurrence of a Repeated Event: Is It a Matter of Helping Them to Generate Options? Martine B. Powell 1,3 and Donald M. Thomson 2 Three experiments were conducted to explore whether children’s recall of an occurrence of a repeated event could be improved by encouraging them to consider various details that occurred across a series of events prior to making a judgement about which details were included in the target (to-be-recalled) occurrence. Experiment 1 explored whether children’s recall of the target occurrence was better after the interviewer presented all the items from the series prior to the child identifying the final item. Experiment 2 explored whether having the children generate all the items facilitated their subsequent recall of the target occurrence. Finally, Experiment 3 directly compared the effectiveness of the above 2 procedures. Regardless of the children’s age, the retention interval, or the type of item, children’s capacity to identify which details were included in a target occurrence was enhanced when they were initially provided with all the possible details from the series of events. However, without relying on the interviewer to generate the options, the benefit of the technique was directly contingent on the children’s ability to generate content details; this was a distinct source of difficulty for the children. Indeed, having children generate options had no beneficial effect on decisions about the temporal position of items unless performance was made conditional on the children’s ability to remember the relevant details in the first place. The implications of the findings for the legal setting and for future research are discussed. KEY WORDS: children’s eyewitness memory; interviewing. The current research explored the effect of a new interview technique designed to facilitate children’s recall of an occurrence of a repeated event. Children’s ability to discriminate between similar occurrences of a repeated event is one of the most crit- ical concerns of investigative and evidentiary interviewers of child witnesses. Child abuse tends to be a repeated offence, yet in normal legal proceedings, for an alleged offender to be charged and convicted in relation to a repeated offence, one or two 1 School of Psychology, Deakin University, Burwood, Australia. 2 School of Social Science, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia. 3 To whom correspondence should be addressed at School of Psychology, Deakin University, 221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood, 3125, Australia; e-mail: mbpowell@deakin.edu.au. 365 0147-7307/03/0800-0365/1 C  2003 American Psychology-Law Society/Division 41 of the American Psychology Association