Celebrating the passion, dedication and personal stories of Social Ecology faculty, staff, students, alumni and benefactors, “The Dean Asks…” is a feature in which Dean Valerie Jenness interviews people inspired by the pursuit of excellence and encourages participation in interdisciplinary education to solve complex societal problems. Please check back to read or listen to additional installments. View Archive
Valerie Jenness, Dean of the School of Social Ecology, interviewed graduate student Kyndra Cleveland, about her research on eliciting accurate reports from children who have witnessed or experienced a crime.
Val: Can you tell us a little bit about the research you do here at UCI?
Kyndra: When I first came to UCI, I was interested in working with adolescents in the juvenile justice system on issues related to risk and recidivism. But as soon as I arrived, I kind of hit the ground running with work in children and the law. I really quickly developed an interest in this population. A good deal of the work that I have done has focused on children's eyewitness testimony. That's essentially when a child has experienced or witnessed a crime. My work focuses on how best to proceed with eliciting a detailed and accurate report from the children. I study how children remember information and some of the limitations that they may have. I also study techniques and questions that interviewers can ask to help get over these limitations and also questions that attorneys in court can ask to try to get around these limitations.
Val: Can you give us some examples of the groups you study and explain some of the dilemmas you face as you try to work with children to elicit information?
Kyndra: I mostly focus on childhood sexual abuse and particularly young children who have experienced it. Most of the children that do experience sexual abuse are between the ages of three and eight, which is pretty young. Some of the limitations that we have with very young children are that they have difficulty focusing or paying attention when you are trying to interview them and get a report from them. That is a cognitive limitation that you have to try to get over and use different techniques to deal with. There are also issues with young children with source monitoring. This means that they have a really difficult time remembering if they imagined something, saw it on TV or if somebody fed the information to them. When you're questioning them it's difficult to know if this is something that the child actually experienced or something that they learned in some other fashion.
Val: It seems to me there is always this dilemma. As a lay person, how do I know when to believe a child?
Kyndra: That is certainly a tough question that the science has not answered yet.
There are certain circumstances that help determine if it is an accurate case and that you may be getting the truth from the child. For example, if the interview occurs very close to the time that this event occurred, the child can usually be accurate in telling what happened because there are not issues of memory delay or decay over time. The closer that the interview occurs to the event is a good thing. Research shows that when an event is personal to children and it is a salient event, children can be quite accurate in explaining details that have occurred.
Val: What scientifically bolsters the credibility versus raises concerns about the veracity of a child’s report?
Kyndra: First, the interviewer's behavior will have a big impact on the child's report. As an interviewer, you don’t want to go into it having a bias or already believing something did or did not occur. Children can pick up on the interviewer’s bias. If the child is giving you details and going on and on about how this did occur and you're getting more and more excited about them giving you this story, then the child is being reinforced by that sort of behavior. That's one thing that you don’t want to do. Second, the types of questions the interviewers ask can also be really important. By asking more closed-ended questions with yes/no answers, you tend to get less accurate responses from children. More open-ended questions, like “What happened to you,” tend to elicit much more accurate reports.
Val: There is a large and growing literature on this topic and you came to just the right place to study it because of our experts here, such as Professor Jodi Quas. You are about to embark on your dissertation, which means you will contribute to this research. What mystery or puzzle are you going to solve?
Kyndra: My dissertation is going to be slightly different than looking at children's eyewitness testimony. It will still focus on maltreated children, but in a very different way. A lot of the work on child maltreatment, for good reason, focuses on children. But this sometimes neglects the other people that are involved. I think that this area of research needs a greater focus on parents, who often are allegedly maltreating, neglecting, or abusing their children. My dissertation is going to focus on parents involved in the Dependency Division of the Juvenile Justice System. You could think of them as the defendant in these cases. I plan to document these parent's experiences and eventually link it back to the children. I am going to survey parents about their knowledge of the system. Do they seem to understand these legal words that are being thrown around in court? Do they understand the many hearings that they have to attend? It is highly likely that they are lacking knowledge in this area because even the legal professionals that work in the dependency system have a hard time keeping track of what is going on within the system. The dependency system is particularly complicated because the cases usually take at least a year, if not longer, and there are several hearings that parents have to attend, court therapy, family counseling, and various other court mandates. It is particularly important to see how parents are experiencing this system so that we can look at how the outcomes of these cases are really reached. Parents must do what the court asks in order to get their children back.
Val: What kinds of things are going through your mind about these parents’ experiences? It's probably every parent's worst nightmare to be accused, rightly or wrongly, of abusing their child.
Kyndra: Exactly. You have to keep an open mind because there are certainly children who do need to be taken away. But there are many cases of parents who may have just made a mistake or they need more resources or information to help them become better parents. I think that it is the court’s job to provide this once they become involved. I anticipate one thing that will come out of this research is the need for more communication between the courts and families. Many of these parents may have a tough time trusting that they can really have much control over the situation. If they believe the courts are looking at them negatively then why would they feel the need to engage or be motivated to take the necessary steps to get their children back? That is just one of the problems. Also I am going to survey parents about their knowledge. If parents do not have a clear understanding of what they are supposed to do or how to do it, they will have a really tough time navigating the system. Lastly, I will be looking at motivation. I think that the attitudes parents have towards the legal system in general can influence their motivation to engage with the system.
Val: I have read about the imposition of a white, middleclass view of child rearing on all sorts of diverse types of people. Do you see any of these notions of what’s acceptable parental care being imposed?
Kyndra: Certainly. First, you can see the families in the system are disproportionally minorities. Parenting practices do differ across different communities and subcultures. I think if the law views certain practices to not be something that they think is fair or acceptable, but is something that a large group of people engage in and for reasons that they think are important to them, then we are sort of targeting this group because it's different than us. I think that is one of the issues. I would definitely like to try to get at some of this through my research. We'll of course be asking about demographic information and then trying to again link that to attitudes. I think when we ask those sorts of questions about how fair do you think it was even how you first got into the system that we'll be able to get at some of those questions.
Val: I know you still have to do the research and it sounds to me like you are going to have some really provocative findings. Do you do this research with the hopes that it will have impact on the system and in the community? Is that one of your goals?
Kyndra: Yes, that is my main goal. I do not think my research would have much importance if I did not try to focus on the practical significance and share it with the people who can make a difference in the infrastructure of the system. One of my goals is to continue to build my statistical and empirical skills, but what I really want to do is be able to take my research to policymakers and legal professionals because I see communication as a need in the system. In all different parts of the system there is a lack of communication. Going back to eyewitness testimony, empirical research has shown us a lot of best evidence-based practices on how we should be interviewing children. We can actually increase comprehensiveness and accuracy of children's reports. But a lot of forensic interviewers aren't trained in this. So first of all, we need communication in this area. In regard to the dependency court, we need much more communication with judges and attorneys to be able to see parent's perspectives from an empirical standpoint. And so they need to know more about where parents are at, what are they lacking when they come into the system, and why do they have negative attitudes. Is there some way to improve those?
Val: We were saying before the tape recorder started we've been very fortunate in Social Ecology that the Presiding Judge, Maria Hernandez, has taken an interest in the research we're doing here. It sounds to me like those are the kinds of things you would want someone like her to know and to hear. Here you have a Presiding Court Judge who's open to research, who has allowed and enabled us to do research for which we are very thankful. Also, we have a next generation researcher and community leader in you who is saying that I want the research to matter. Those two people talking to each other is the benefit of the research.
Kyndra: It is so important and I think a lot of people realize it, but when you actually start doing the work you see the hurdles. I think practitioners and scientists in general have some sort of distrust that sometimes they don’t want to acknowledge. For scientists we really believe in the importance of our work and we know we go about it in very strategic and meticulous ways. Sometimes we don’t see the importance of the practitioners and their everyday dealing with these families. But then the practitioner's argue, "Well I know exactly what's going on with the parents because I actually deal with them every day and you guys are over there building your theories, and you don’t really know what's going on." So that is why it is tough for these two communities to talk to each other. But I believe it is really important and we both have a lot to offer each other.
Val: Looking into the future, what is your ultimate goal – researcher or policy advisor?
Kyndra: It's tough to pinpoint my future job because I don’t think a lot of actual jobs exist for what I want to do. I want to continue to conduct scientific research in the area of children's eyewitness abilities, dependency court, or maybe delinquency court in the Juvenile Justice System. But I want to keep an open line of communication, as I have said before, with legal professionals and people who can actually affect policy. I have identified some jobs with the Department of Justice where they allow you to do this. They keep you working closely with practitioners and people who actually can change policy, but you are also doing research at the same time and program evaluations and interventions. That is the type of work I would like to do.
Val: Of all the things you could have studied, why this?
Kyndra: It started with my interest in the legal system in general. I have always been fascinated by it. When I was thinking about whether I wanted to go to law school or pursue a Ph.D. I thought back to my experiences as a younger person when I worked as a secretary in a law firm. I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer from that experience. When I found out there was this field of psychology and law where you can blend the two I naturally was really excited about it and jumped into the research.
Val: Tell me why you came to the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at UCI. You could have gone anywhere in the country, why us?
Kyndra: There aren't many programs throughout the country that focus and specialize in psychology and law. I did visit a few of them, but when I came here to UCI, I could see myself living here, the people were great, and the research they were doing was important. I think the school really emphasizes that your work should have an impact on the community. That was one of the reasons that I came here, as well.
Val: What else should people know about you?
Kyndra: Well, I think related to my work in general I am a passionate person, but for this work I am particularly passionate. I'm passionate about trying to give those children a voice and to take some of the power back that I feel like has been taken from them in these cases. That is one thing that people should know about me. Also, I have a two and a half year old son who is a joy. Of course it is challenging to balance a work and a home life but I think I certainly have the support system from my advisor and other people in the department to be able to do that as well as the wonderful childcare that's provided here. I feel privileged and blessed to be able to care for a family of my own, but also to be doing work that I think is so extremely important in impacting other children and families as well.