Research on Forensic Reports

Reports of FMHA are meant to serve as evidence in court, which requires

careful attention to both their content and form (Ireland, 2008). Compared with
empirical studies on forensic assessment and its instruments, there is a rather limited
research base on forensic report writing (Griffith, Stankovic, & Baranoski, 2010).
A review of 10 studies that examined the quality of forensic reports (Wettstein,
2005) revealed six of these studies actually examined forensic reports to identify
the frequency of various strengths and weaknesses in terms of their content
and form. Four of these six studies (Christy, Douglas, Otto, & Petrila, 2004;
Hecker & Steinberg, 2002; Robbins, Waters, & Herbert, 1997; Skeem, Golding,
Cohn, & Berge, 1998) revealed that evaluators mostly reported relevant data, and
the psycholegal question was often addressed adequately, but the reports often
failed to include the evaluator’s reasoning about the link between the data and
the evaluator’s opinion about the psycholegal question