The effect of interviewing techniques on young children's responses to questions.

BACKGROUND: Research into the effect of interviewing techniques has been predominantly within the paradigm of eyewitness testimony. This review focuses on the issues of questioning and examines whether children's responses are affected by questioning techniques, and whether these effects are generic to all interviewing contexts. METHODS: Systematic literature searches were used to identify areas of concern and current findings in research on interviewing young children (aged 4-12). RESULTS: The style and wording of questioning can affect children's responses and accuracy positively and negatively. These effects were especially apparent in interviews with the youngest children. CONCLUSIONS: The implications of these findings are relevant in all contexts where an adult questions a child. It has been demonstrated that interviewing techniques can affect responses from children and that it is therefore imperative that interviewers are aware of, understand and control their influence in order to elicit complete, accurate and reliable information from the child.

Dietary advice in the management of diabetes mellitus--history and current practice.

Diet has been recognised for over three thousand years as being vital to the overall management of diabetes mellitus (DM). Today dietary advice for the person with diabetes continues to play just as an important role, not just as regards the day to day control but also in respect of the prevention of complications. The history of dietary advice for diabetes is examined as well as current dietary advice.

Mental rotation of a tactile layout by young visually impaired children.

Mental rotation tasks have been used to probe the mental imagery both of sighted and of visually impaired people. People who have been blind since birth display a response pattern which is qualitatively similar to that of sighted people but tend to respond more slowly or with a higher error rate. It has been suggested that visually impaired people code the stimulus and its (or their own) motion in a different way from sighted people-in particular, congenitally blind people may ignore the external reference framework provided by the stimulus and surrounding objects, and instead use body-centred or movement-based coding systems. What has not been considered before is the relationship between different strategies for tactually exploring the stimulus and the response pattern of congenitally blind participants. Congenitally blind and partially sighted children were tested for their ability to learn and recall a layout of tactile symbols. Children explored layouts of one, three, or five shapes which they then attempted to reproduce. On half the trials there was a short pause between exploring and reproducing the layouts. In an aligned condition children reproduced the array from the same position at which they had explored it; in a rotated condition children were asked to move 90 degrees round the table between exploring and reproducing the layout. Both congenitally blind and partially sighted children were less accurate in the rotated condition than in the aligned condition. Five distinct strategies used by the children in learning the layout were identified. These strategies interacted with both visual status and age. We suggest that the use of strategies, rather than visual status or chronological age, accounts for differences in performances between children.

Cathodic stripping voltammetry of nanogram amounts of selenium in biological material.

A method is described to determine selenium in biological material, based on cathodic stripping voltammetry. Following wet ashing, the selenium was extracted into benzene as the 3',4'-diaminophenylpiazselenol. The selenium was subsequently back-extracted into dilute acid for analysis. Analyses of NBS Bovine Liver demonstrated that the method was capable of recovering 96+/-9% of the selenium present. The detection limit and working range were 3 ng/g and 0-10,000 ng/g, respectively. The method was also applied to the determination of selenium in rapeseed oils and seed.