Award winning development psychologist Stephen J. Ceci, Ph.D., of Cornell University has conducted a laboratory research, studying some factors that can affect a child's testimony. These conclude:

 Interviewer bias-When the interviewer (parent, therapist, investigator) believes he or she knows what happened and attempts to get the child to confirm it, ignoring anything the child says that does not conform with the interviewer's bias and encouraging anything that does.

 Repeated Questions-Children, especially younger children are more likely to change their answers when asked the same yes or no question repeated during a single interview. Answers from children to yes or no questions repeated over several interviews are likely to become more firm and confid

People who interview a child need some kind of training in interviewing children. The type of interviewing is forensic interviewing. The purpose of this interviewing method is to obtain the most accurate and complete report from a child. To know how to do this takes incredible skill, such as building rapport with children. The interviewer needs to know what questions are of advantage or disadvantage. "Using nothing but specific open-ended questions may be appropriate for a certain child in a certain situation but not for another child of a different age and background, or for a child who is afraid to tell versus one who is prone to fantasy, or for a child questioned about events in the distant past." (Children Today)

"What, then, can adults do to obtain accurate and complete information from children? Imagine that authorities suspect abuse and you are charged with interviewing the child in question. Would you simply ask nonspecific, vague questions such as, "Did anyone ever do something to you that you didn't like?" If the child did not disclose abuse, would you leave it at that? What if the child exhibited physical signs of abuse or was acting out sexually and experiencing nightmares? Would you go further to ask more specific questions? Would you ask the child to act out the event with dolls, perhaps anatomically detailed dolls? How would you balance the fact that the child might need to be repeatedly questioned with the concern that a non abused child might be led to falsely believe that he or she is an abuse victim? What if it was your own child? Because most specific questions ("Did Uncle Bill hurt you?" "Did someone touch you down there?") can be construed as leading, almos!

In January 1986 the defense moved to disqualify the two little girls as witnesses. The defense stated, that the girls "learned" that the incident had occurred through the coercive questioning of many adults. A deep concern on the part of the judge in Hawaii about suggestibility and memory distortion was the basis for the decision to disqualify the children as witness, because the methods by which they had been questioned led to serious doubts about their ability to report their own recollection of events.

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