Drawing and showing: Helping children to report emotionally laden events

This study examined the effectiveness of drawing and re-enactment as means of facilitating children's verbal reports about emotionally laden events. S ixty children, aged 5 and 8 years, were interviewed about times when they h ad felt happy, sad and scared in one of three interview conditions; drawing , in which they were asked to draw and tell, re-enactment. in which they we re asked to re-enact and tell, or verbal, in which they were simply asked t o tell. For children of both age groups, drawing and re-enactment enhanced the amount of information reported relative to a verbal interview. Further. drawing and re-enactment elicited a greater number of items of descriptive information than did the verbal interview. The possible mechanisms underly ing these findings and their implications for interviewing children in clin ical contexts are discussed. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.