Interviewing Autistic Adults: Adaptations to Support Recall in Police, Employment, and Healthcare Interviews

Background:

Recounting past experiences is a crucial feature of most formal social interactions, including when being interviewed for a job or in the Criminal Justice System (CJS), during a health or social care consultation, or as part of assessments for welfare. During such interviews we usually need to recall personal memories of specific episodes, which can be difficult for autistic adults under standard questioning structures (e.g., open questioning).

Objectives:

There is little research into methods of facilitatingautistic adults’ recall outside of lab-based memory tasks. The current study aimed to investigate this within the framework of the ‘Task Support Hypothesis’ (Bowler et al., 1997) by testing the efficacy of interview prompting techniques in supporting autistic adults’ recall of specific personal memories.

Methods: Based on an a-priori sample size calculation (assuming α =.05), in order to achieve Cohen’s (1992) recommended power of .80 to detect a medium-to-large effect size, 32 ASD and 31 typically developing (TD) participants were recruited. Participants were asked to recall specific instances from their past that were relevant to CJS, healthcare, and employment interviews. Eighteen questions were split into three blocks: (1) OPENquestions (e.g., “Tell me about a specific instance when you have been to the supermarket”); (2) SEMANTIC SUPPORT- general personal memories were prompted first to support recall of a specific instance (e.g., “are you a worrier?” … “Tell me about a specific instance when you have felt worried”); (3) VERBAL LABELS - participants received a visual pie-diagram with prompts to recall: When? People? Actions? Setting? Objects? Half of the participants also received preparatory information which included the question topics. The study used a mixed factorial design: 2 (Autistic, TD) x 2 (Preparation, No Preparation) x 3 (Support: Open, Semantic Support, Verbal Labels), where Support was within-subjects

Results:

Participants’ interview answers were coded for specificity(level of specific detail provided) and relevance (number of episodically and semantically relevant details recalled).

Specificity- autistic participants recalled less specific memories overall (F(1, 55) =5.58, p=.022,
n_p²= .09). Specificity was improved for both groups in the Verbal Labels condition(F(2,110) =14.39, p<.001, n_p²=.21). Answers to CJS questions were more specific than those for health and job questions (F(2, 110) = 24.20, =p < .001, n_p²= .31). Employmentquestions were particularly difficult for autistic participants (Context*Group: F(2, 110) =3.14, p =.047, n_p²=.05). Finally, when answering job questions, semantic support aided autistic participants to recall a more specific memory (but not for health and CJS; Support*Context*Group:F(4, 220) =3.28, p =.012, n_p²=.06).

Preliminary analyses also indicate that question support facilitates recall of more episodically-relevant details.

Conclusions:

Autistic participants recalled less specific memories overall, and struggled with job questions in particular. Verbal labels provided the most effective support for specificity. The findings will inform interviewing professionals about methods they can use to facilitate communication with autistic adults. The results provide further evidence for the task support hypothesis (Bowler et al., 1997).