Guidelines for Forensic Report Writing: Helping Trainees Understand Common Pitfalls to Improve Reports

A forensic report is the primary work product of a forensic psychologist. The aim of a forensic report is to inform and influence the court. Unlike a clinical report, a forensic report influences the outcome of a legal conflict. This means that greater care must be taken in writing the report. The following errors (Grisso, 2010) were used to discuss best practices in forensic report writing: failure to answer the referral question, organization problems, language problems, mixed data and interpretation, inclusion of irrelevant data, over-reliance on a single source of data, improper psychological test use, failure to consider alternative hypotheses, and opinions without sufficient explanation. The purpose of this paper is to provide in one place all the information needed to improve forensic report writing, and to help the reader apply the literature using specific examples. Redacted report samples were collected from psychologists, graduate psychology trainees, teaching assistant experience, and clinical work. Identified errors in these samples were then corrected using the recommendations in the literature. Geared toward graduate psychology trainees, each section should serve both as a tutorial and as a brief checklist to help the reader avoid common pitfalls and assist in promoting better forensic report writing.

Guide to Writing a Programmatic Resource Management Plan/ Environmental Impact Statement for the Bureau of Land Management

This guide is written for Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) employees assigned to the Public Lands team who may have some National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) knowledge, possibly have experience with writing Environmental Impact Statements (EIS), and with little or no experience writing programmatic EIS documents. The guide contains information encompassing the preparation of a complete Resource Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement (RMP/EIS) for the Bureau of Land Management. The RMP/EIS is a programmatic NEPA document which has many differences and nuances distinct from a typical project type EIS. This guide provides the information necessary for a BAH Public Lands team member to understand the project process and the RMP/EIS document to successfully maneuver through the entire project from beginning to end.