Journal article
IV. INDIVIDUAL CASE STUDIES ILLUSTRATING FORMAL QUALITY GUIDELINES: Pragmatic Psychology, Forensic Mental Health Assessment, and the Case of Thomas Johnson: Applying Principles to Promote Quality
Psychology, Public Policy and Law, Vol.10, pp.31-577
01 Mar 2004
Abstract
The field of forensic mental health assessment (FMHA) has witnessed significant advances during the past 2 decades. Such advances have been seen in (a) an increasingly sophisticated recognition of the law's demands (Grisso, 1986; Melton, Petrila, Poythress, & Slobogin, 1997); (b) the development of empirically validated tools to assist in the evaluation of individuals on legal questions such as adjudicative competence (Poythress, Monahan, Bonnie, & Hoge, 1999), competence to consent to treatment (Grisso & Appelbaum, 1998), and forensically relevant issues such as response style (Frederick, 1997; Rogers, 1992) and violence risk assessment (Monahan et al., 2000; Quinsey, Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1998; Webster, Douglas, Eaves, & Hart, 1997); and (c) the development of specialty guidelines for ethics and practice (American Psychological Association, 1994; Committee on Ethical Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists, 1991). One of the enduring conflicts between law and the behavioral sciences, however, involves the use of individual cases to advance knowledge. The law's focus on individualized justice and the inclination of behavioral science researchers to study participants across multiple characteristics and outcomes makes it difficult to use a highly relevant source of data--individual forensic case reports--to systematically gather information from this source in a meaningful way. In this article, we consider how pragmatic psychology (Fishman, 1999, 2000) can be applied, using recently derived principles of FMHA (Heilbrun, 2001), toward several purposes: (a) using principles to guide the construction of a single case report, (b) measuring the quality of a single case report, and (c) gauging the normative aspects of ...
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Details
- Title
- IV. INDIVIDUAL CASE STUDIES ILLUSTRATING FORMAL QUALITY GUIDELINES: Pragmatic Psychology, Forensic Mental Health Assessment, and the Case of Thomas Johnson: Applying Principles to Promote Quality
- Creators
- Kirk HeilbrunDavid DeMatteoGeoffrey Marczyk
- Publication Details
- Psychology, Public Policy and Law, Vol.10, pp.31-577
- Publisher
- American Psychological Association Psychology, Public Policy and Law
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Psychology; Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Identifiers
- 991019203416904721