Editorial Perspective: Questioning kids: applying the lessons from developmentally sensitive investigative interviewing to the research context

In 1989, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child solidified that “the child who is capable of forming his or her own views [has] the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child.” Involving children as research participants is one key method of ensuring that children’s voices are heard, especially in psychological science where researchers gather information from children across clinical, developmental, health, cognitive, and social research contexts and in related fields like psychiatry, social work, nursing, and medicine. How we talk to children as researchers affects whether we produce rigorous science, and a consensus that has emerged from decades of research on children’s eyewitness testimony demands that we pause for critical self-reflection. In this piece, we propose that scientists studying children consider a large but siloed body of work on developmentally-sensitive investigative interviewing to facilitate complete, accurate, and honest responding from children in research studies. By examining how researchers phrase questions, how they contextualize questioning, and how they report methodology, we address concrete avenues for ensuring robust and reliable psychological science, as well as pathways for children’s optimal involvement in the research process.