Norris, J; Crane, L; Maras, K; (2020) Interviewing autistic adults: adaptations to support recall in police, employment, and healthcare interviews. Autism (In press).

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Abstract

Recalling specific past experiences is critical for most formal social interactions, including when being interviewed for employment, as a witness or defendant in the Criminal Justice System (CJS), or as a patient during a clinical consultation. Such interviews can be difficult for autistic adults under standard open questioning, yet applied research into effective methods to facilitate autistic adults’ recall is beginning to emerge. The current study tested the efficacy of different prompting techniques to support autistic adults’ recall of specific personal memories. Thirty autistic and 30 typically developing (TD) adults (IQs > 85) were asked to recall specific instances from their past, relevant to CJS, healthcare, and employment interviews. Questions comprised ‘open questions’, ‘semantic prompting’ (where semantic knowledge was used to prompt specific episodic retrieval), and ‘visual-verbal prompting’ (V-VP; a pie-diagram with prompts to recall specific details, e.g., who, what, where, etc). Half the participants received the questions in advance. Consistent with previous research, autistic participants reported memories with reduced specificity. For both groups, V-VP support improved specificity and episodic-relevance, while semantic prompting also aided recall for employment questions (but not health or CJS). Findings offer new practical insight for interviewers to facilitate communication with TD and autistic adults.

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