Overview
The Children Recalling Autobiographical Memory (CRAM) is a 20-cue-word assessment designed to measure autobiographical memory and narrative skills in children aged 7–16 years. It assesses both retrospective and prospective autobiographical memory by evaluating whether children's written accounts contain five core narrative components: Where, What, When, Who and How. The measure was developed particularly with clinical and forensic assessment in mind, where objective evaluation of children's ability to recall and describe autobiographical experiences may be important. The CRAM was developed in response to the absence of a standardised metric measure of autobiographical narrative skills in children. Its theoretical basis draws on Conway's model of autobiographical memory and research using cue-word approaches to autobiographical recall. The assessment contains two sections: 1. Retrospective autobiographical memory – children recall events from their own lives. 2. Prospective autobiographical memory – children imagine possible personal future events.Scoring & Interpretation
The CRAM contains 20 cue words, divided equally between retrospective and prospective autobiographical memory. For each cue word, the child is asked to recall or imagine a personal event and, as far as possible, provide information about: • Where • What • When • Who • How Each narrative component present in the response receives 1 point. Each cue word can therefore receive a score from: 0 = none of the five narrative components present to 5 = all five narrative components present The 20 cue-word scores can be summed to produce an overall autobiographical memory/narrative skill score. Based on the scoring system described by the authors, the theoretical total range is therefore 0–100, with higher scores indicating more complete autobiographical narrative skills. The original article provides both the cue-word list and a scoring sheet in its Appendix.Psychometric Properties
Internal Consistency
Test-Retest Reliability
Factor Structure
Validity
Evidence for validity is currently preliminary. The CRAM demonstrated theoretically expected relationships with age and aspects of memory and suggestibility. Age was positively correlated with the overall CRAM score and CRAM scores were also positively associated with immediate recall on the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale. Higher CRAM scores were associated with lower Yield 1 suggestibility and Total suggestibility. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that stronger autobiographical narrative abilities are associated with greater resistance to some forms of suggestive questioning.
Measurement Invariance
Access
The original Vagni et al. (2024) article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, permitting use, distribution and reproduction provided appropriate attribution is given.
The article's Appendix provides the complete list of the 20 CRAM cue words and a scoring-sheet template.
http://CRAM – Frontiers in Psychology