Robert F. Belli

Event History Calendars and Question List Surveys: A Direct Comparison of Interviewing Methods

The research reported in this article provides the first direct experimental comparison between Event History Calendar (EHC; N=309; 84.4 percent response rate) and standardized state-of-the-art question list (Q-list; N=307; 84.1 percent response rate) interviewing methodologies. Respondents and 20 interviewers were randomly assigned to EHC and Q-list interviews that were conducted via telephone in the spring of 1998. All interviews asked for retrospective reports on social and economic behaviors that occurred during the calendar years of 1996 and 1997. Using data from the same respondents collected 1 year earlier on events reported during 1996 as a standard of comparison, the quality of retrospective reports on 1996 events from the 1998 administration of EHC and Q-list interviews was assessed. In comparison to the Q-list, the EHC condition led to better-quality retrospective reports on moves, income, weeks unemployed, and weeks missing work resulting from self illness, the illness of another, or missing work for these reasons in combination with other ones. For reports of household members entering the residence, and number of jobs, the EHC led to significantly more overreporting than the Q-list. Contingent on additional research that examines a wider range of reference periods and different modes of interviewing, the EHC may become a viable and potentially superior method to the Q-list in the collection of self-reported retrospective information.

REDUCING VOTE OVERREPORTING IN SURVEYS SOCIAL DESIRABILITY, MEMORY FAILURE, AND SOURCE MONITORING

One of the most frequently observed survey measurement errors is theoverreporting of voting behavior. Almost since the series of AmericanNational Election Studies (NES) began, the level of survey reported turn-out has been higher than estimates of turnout based on aggregate votetotals and census counts of the population (Clausen 1968). In addition,validation studies have confirmed that respondents will tend to overreportvoting (Abelson, Loftus, and Greenwald 1992; Parry and Crossley 1950;Presser, Traugott, and Traugott 1990; Silver, Anderson, and Abramson1986; Traugott and Katosh 1979).Two different explanations of overreporting have been tendered. Oneexplanation considers overreporting the result of social desirability, in

The Role of Ease of Retrieval and Attribution in Memory Judgments: Judging Your Memory as Worse Despite Recalling More Events

Participants who had to recall 12 childhood events (a difficult task) were more likely to infer that they could not remember large parts of their childhood than participants who had to recall 4 events (an easy task), although the former recalled three times as many events. This pattern of results suggests that memory judgments are based on the experienced ease or difficulty of recall. Accordingly, the negative impact of recalling 12 events was attenuated when participants were led to attribute the experienced difficulty to the task rather than to the poor quality of their memory. The findings emphasize the role of subjective experiences and attribution in metamemory judgments.

Memory impairment and source misattribution in postevent misinformation experiments with short retention intervals

The four experiments reported here provide evidence that (1) misleading postevent suggestions can impair memory for details in a witnessed event and (2) subjects sometimes remember sug-gested details as things seen in the event itself. All four experiments used recall tests in which subjects were warned of the possibility that the postevent information included misleading sug-gestions and were instructed to report both what they witnessed in the event and what was men-tioned in the postevent narrative. Recall of event details was poorer on misled items than on control items, and subjects sometimes misidentified the sources of their recollections. Our re-sults suggest that these findings are not due to guessing or response biases, but rather reflect genuine memory impairment and source monitoring confusions.

Misinformation effects and the suggestibility of eyewitness memory

Social scientists and legal practitioners have long suspected that suggestive forensic interview practices are a major cause of inaccuracies in eyewitness testimony. However, it wasn’t until Elizabeth Loftus published a highly influential series of studies on eyewitness suggestibility in the 1970s that a systematic body of scientific literature on this topic started to emerge. Since then, hundreds of empirical studies on eyewitness suggestibility have been published, all of them variants of the basic experimental paradigm that Loftus developed. In the early 1970s, research and theorizing about memory was based almost exclusively on studies of memory for lists of words or sentences (see, e.g., Crowder, 1976). By studying memory for complex, fast-moving, and forensically relevant events (typically depicted in film clips or slide shows), Loftus demonstrated that it was possible to conduct well-controlled experiments that were high in ecological validity (Banaji & Crowder, 1989). Her studies provided clear evidence that suggestive interviews can lead to profound errors in eyewitness testimony, thus raising serious questions about the reliability of memory and eyewitness testimony. Her work established that scientific research on memory and suggestibility can and should inform the courts. In addition, her findings inspired many theoretical

Color blend retrievals: Compromise memories or deliberate compromise responses?

A total of 978 subjects, in two experiments and two pilot studies, were asked to recognize the color of objects to which they had been exposed in a slide presentation. Taken together, the studies demonstrate that an object’s typical coloration influences recognitions, resulting in retrievals that compromise or blend the actual color and the typical color. In addition, Experiment 2 suggests that color recognitions may be simultaneously influenced by typical knowledge, event information, and postevent information. The findings question the adequacy of both the deliberate compromise and the compromise memory hypotheses as accounts for color blend retrievals. The deliberate compromise hypothesis fails to account for evidence that blend retrievals result because an intact representation of an event is not available at the time of test. The compromise memory hypothesis fails to account for evidence that deliberative processes do occur, and is in need of further exposition given that blend retrievals may be the result of different processes when resulting from typical knowledge and from postevent information. In conclusion, neither hypothesis, in isolation, is able to account for the various possible processes that appear responsible for blend retrievals.

The pliability of autobiographical memory: Misinformation and the false memory problem

One aspect of autobiographical memory that has received considerable attention during the past two decades deals with the psychological mechanisms that underlie the memory and report of eyewitnesses. The misinformation effect is particularly concerned with what happens to people when they witness an event, such as a crime or accident, and are later misinformed about some aspect of the original event (Loftus, 1992). As is well known, eyewitnesses are not secluded after witnessing an event. Rather, they may discuss the event with other witnesses, and they are usually extensively questioned by criminal justice personnel both before and during any criminal or civil court appearance (Loftus, 1975, 1979). Such interactions provide ripe opportunities for the introduction of misinformation. Recent experimental work supports the view that misinformation affects memory, and therefore, that actual eyewitnesses may be susceptible to making unintentional false reports. In fact, false reports have been relatively easy to induce in the laboratory. After exposure to misinformation, subjects have been induced to report having seen a variety of nonexistent objects, such as yield signs (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978), hammers (McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985a), eggs (Ceci, Ross, & Toglia, 1987), mustaches (Gibling & Davies, 1988), broken glass (Loftus & Palmer, 1974) and even something as large as a barn (Loftus, 1975). This research shows that misinformation can be dangerously robust in compromising the accuracy of the memory and report of actual eyewitnesses.

RECALLING MORE CHILDHOOD EVENTS LEADS TO JUDGMENTS OF POORER MEMORY : IMPLICATIONS FOR THE RECOVERED/FALSE MEMORY DEBATE

Dissociative disorders that are believed to develop from childhood sexual abuse are often considered to include amnesia for childhood events, particularly the events that involve the abuse itself. One unresolved issue is the extent to which memory recovery attempts can contribute to claims of having amnestic symptoms. Experiments with undergraduate subjects reveal that requiring more reports of childhood events will increase judgments of having poorer memory of one’s childhood. The results are consistent with the use of heuristics when one is reasoning under conditions of uncertainty, as experienced difficulty in remembering more experiences is attributed to the incompleteness of childhood memory. The findings challenge the validity of reports of childhood amnesia that follow memory recovery attempts.

Decomposition Can Harm the Accuracy of Behavioural Frequency Reports

In survey research, the use of decomposition can lead to pronounced reporting errors as seen by overreporting and overall reporting error. A total of 87 subjects answered either decomposed or undecomposed questions concerning telephone calls made by them while at work. The questionnaire conditions varied the length of the reference period (1 week or 6 months), and the type of call (local or long-distance). Decomposition conditions introduced either spatial or temporal cues. In all comparisons, decomposed questions increased overreporting bias relative to undecomposed questions. In addition, undecomposed questions with a 1-week reference period led to increased overreporting bias in comparison to undecomposed/6-month questions. Results are consistent with a category split estimation model in which smaller categories are predicted to lead to overreporting, and larger categories to underreporting. Decomposition is not recommended for gaining retrospective reports of non-distinctive, frequent events. Copyright

Incongruous item generation effects: a multiple-cue perspective.

In a series of studies, generation effects were obtained under encoding conditions designed to induce incongruous, unrelated item generation. Experiments 1 and 2, using free- and cued-recall measures, respectively, provided evidence that this unrelated generation effect was due to response-specific processing. Experiment 3 demonstrated a lack of relation between free recall and indices of clustering. A preliminary protocol study suggested that Ss generate multiple items in their search for appropriate unrelated responses. In Experiments 4 and 5, conditions designed to produce more extensive multiple generations demonstrated enhanced free recall. These results supported a multiple-cue account of facilitated recall for incongruous item generation. The multiple-cue perspective is consistent with traditional conceptualizations of memory, such as the principle of congruity, and contemporary distinctions between cue-target relational and item-specific processing.