A suggestibility scale for children

This article describes the development and properties of the Video Suggestibility Scale for Children (Video SSC), a scale designed to measure individual differences in suggestibility in preschool children. The scale was administered to 195 3- to 5-year-old children, and the results suggest that they tend to respond affirmatively to suggestive questions (‘Yield’) and change their answers in response to negative feedback (‘Shift’) in a manner similar to adults, though at an elevated rate. Older children were able to remember the video better than younger children in memory recall, but were also more likely to shift their answers in response to negative feedback. The scale items had satisfactory internal consistency and were factor analyzed using the Varimax procedure. Yield and Shift were found to load on different factors, supporting Gudjonsson’s (1984) view that there are at least two basic types of interrogative suggestibility [Gudjonsson, G. H. (1984). A new scale of interrogative suggestibility. Personality and Individual Differences, 5, 303–314]. Finally, preliminary validity analyses with an early version of the Video SSC reveals that it is predictive of suggestibility errors made in an independent study, using different procedures.