What is it about?
Traditional report formats used to summarize forensic mental health evaluations pose several significant limitations, including that they implicitly encourage the inclusion of irrelevant data and only data that are consistent with one’s opinions, and they discourage writers from explicitly distinguishing between case data, their inferences, and their reasoning. To remedy these issues, we propose a relevancy-focused (RF) report format, which is a findings-based report style developed specifically for use when summarizing results of forensic psychological evaluations. We describe a practical guide to the critical thinking and rhetorical writing embodied in the RF.
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Why is it important?
Forensic psychological evaluations play a key role in civil and criminal litigation, as do the reports that summarize them. Reports must accurately and efficiently communicate the assessment process, the data gathered, and the examiner's opinions and underlying reasoning. Described in this manuscript is a structure for forensic report writing that was designed specifically with these important obligations in mind.
Perspectives
I have found that the RF has been a wonderful vehicle for the practical application of core principles of critical thinking to forensic report writing. Although the goal was not to create a briefer report, that is a typical consequence of focusing on what is relevant. Happily, this results in less time indulging irrelevant or otherwise unnecessary data, and leaves more time for careful consideration of case data. In my view, this is a worthy trade-off.
Terry Kukor
Ohio State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The relevancy-focused report: An alternative model format for forensic psychological reports., Professional Psychology Research and Practice, July 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pro0000563.
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