A study of outcomes measures in forensic mental health

Outcomes measures, which is the measurement of effectiveness of interventions and services has been propelled onto the health service agenda since the introduction of the internal market in the 1990s. It arose as a result of the escalating cost of inpatient care, the need to identify what interventions work and in what situations, and the desire for effective information by service users enabled by the consumerist agenda introduced by Working for Patients white paper. The research reported in this thesis is an assessment of the readiness of the forensic mental health service to measure outcomes of interventions. The research examines the type, prevalence and scope of use of outcomes measures, and further seeks a consensus of views of key stakeholders on the priority areas for future development. It discusses the theoretical basis for defining health and advocates the argument that the present focus on measuring effectiveness of care is misdirected without the input of users, particularly patients in their care, drawing together the views of the many stakeholders who have an interest in the provision of care in the service. The research further draws on the theory of structuration to demonstrate the degree to which a duality of action, which is necessary for the development, and use of outcomes measures is in place within the service. Consequently, it highlights some of the hurdles that need to be surmounted before effective measurement of health gain can be developed in the field of study. It concludes by advancing the view that outcomes research can enable practitioners to better understand the relationship between the illness of the patient and the efficacy of treatment. This understanding it is argued would contribute to improving dialogue between the health care practitioner and the patient, and further providing the information necessary for moving away from untested assumptions, which are numerous in the field about the superiority of one treatment approach over another.

Communication in investigative and legal contexts:integrated approaches from forensic psychology, linguistics and law enforcement

Communication in Forensic Contexts provides in-depth coverage of the complex area of communication in forensic situations. Drawing on expertise from forensic psychology, linguistics and law enforcement worldwide, the text bridges the gap between these fields in a definitive guide to best practice. • Offers best practice for understanding and improving communication in forensic contexts, including interviewing of victims, witnesses and suspects, discourse in courtrooms, and discourse via interpreters • Bridges the knowledge gaps between forensic psychology, forensic linguistics and law enforcement, with chapters written by teams bringing together expertise from each field • Published in collaboration with the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group, dedicated to furthering evidence-based practice and practice-based research amongst researchers and practitioners • International, cross-disciplinary team includes contributors from North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, and from psychology, linguistics and forensic practice

Approaching questions in forensic authorship analysis

This chapter demonstrates diversity in the activity of authorship and the corresponding diversity of forensic authorship analysis questions and techniques. Authorship is discussed in terms of Love’s (2002) multifunctional description of precursory, executive, declarative and revisionary authorship activities and the implications of this distinction for forensic problem solving. Four different authorship questions are considered. These are ‘How was the text produced?’, ‘How many people wrote the text?’, ‘What kind of person wrote the text?’ and ‘What is the relationship of a queried text with comparison texts?’ Different approaches to forensic authorship analysis are discussed in terms of their appropriateness to answering different authorship questions. The conclusion drawn is that no one technique will ever be appropriate to all problems.

Experts:the knowledge and power of expertise

In this book, Stehr and Grundmann outline the theoretical significance and practical importance of the growing stratum of experts, counsellors and advisors in contemporary society, and claim that the growing spectrum of knowledge-based occupations has led to the pluralisation of expertise. As decision makers in organizations and private citizens, for various reasons, increasingly seek advice from experts, the authors examine the nature of expert activity, and suggest that the role of experts needs to be distinguised from other roles such as professionals, scientists, or intellectuals. Experts, they argue, perform knowledge based activities that mediate between the context of knowledge creation and application. Existing approaches tend to restrict the role of the expert to scientists, or to conflate the roles of professionals with experts. In avoiding such restrictions, this book sets out a framework to understanding the growing role of expertise in a better way. Experts provides thought-provoking discussion that will be of interest to postgraduate students and academics working within the fields of social theory, knowledge, and consumption.

Detecting plagiarism in the forensic linguistics turn

This study investigates plagiarism detection, with an application in forensic contexts. Two types of data were collected for the purposes of this study. Data in the form of written texts were obtained from two Portuguese Universities and from a Portuguese newspaper. These data are analysed linguistically to identify instances of verbatim, morpho-syntactical, lexical and discursive overlap. Data in the form of survey were obtained from two higher education institutions in Portugal, and another two in the United Kingdom. These data are analysed using a 2 by 2 between-groups Univariate Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), to reveal cross-cultural divergences in the perceptions of plagiarism. The study discusses the legal and social circumstances that may contribute to adopting a punitive approach to plagiarism, or, conversely, reject the punishment. The research adopts a critical approach to plagiarism detection. On the one hand, it describes the linguistic strategies adopted by plagiarists when borrowing from other sources, and, on the other hand, it discusses the relationship between these instances of plagiarism and the context in which they appear. A focus of this study is whether plagiarism involves an intention to deceive, and, in this case, whether forensic linguistic evidence can provide clues to this intentionality. It also evaluates current computational approaches to plagiarism detection, and identifies strategies that these systems fail to detect. Specifically, a method is proposed to translingual plagiarism. The findings indicate that, although cross-cultural aspects influence the different perceptions of plagiarism, a distinction needs to be made between intentional and unintentional plagiarism. The linguistic analysis demonstrates that linguistic elements can contribute to finding clues for the plagiarist’s intentionality. Furthermore, the findings show that translingual plagiarism can be detected by using the method proposed, and that plagiarism detection software can be improved using existing computer tools.

The role of experts in policy making

As public policy issues increasingly have a technical aspect to them an interactive relationship has developed between science and policy. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the two aspects of this relationship: the influence of science on policy and the influence of policy implications on science. Most existing studies in this area treat only one or other of these aspects. Furthermore, they tend to provide interesting case study material but very little theoretical analysis. This thesis attempts to overcome these problems by dealing with both aspects of the interaction between science and policy and by providing theoretical models of this relationship. The thesis combines the theoretical development of these models with the analysis of three empirical case studies: the controversy in Britain over smoking and health; the application of educational psychology to the development of education policy in Britain; the controversy over the health effect of lead in the environment. The theoretical models are developed in Part 1. In Part 2 the empirical case studies are presented and in Part 3 the theoretical material is assessed in the light of these case studies. The main thesis of this study is that there is a fundamental mismatch between science and policy-making. Criticism is always essential in science. However, when science is involved in the policy process, either scientific claims are not subjected to a significant level of criticism or they are scrutinized so closely that no view achieves general consensus and conflicting advice results. In this situation, contrary to the traditional view, science can generate uncertainty. The role which science plays in the policy process is influenced by this level of criticism, by the context of political power and by the progress of an issue through the various stages of the policy process.

“I didn’t mean to steal someone else’s words!”:a forensic linguistic approach to detecting intentional plagiarism

The concept of plagiarism is not uncommonly associated with the concept of intellectual property, both for historical and legal reasons: the approach to the ownership of ‘moral’, nonmaterial goods has evolved to the right to individual property, and consequently a need was raised to establish a legal framework to cope with the infringement of those rights. The solution to plagiarism therefore falls most often under two categories: ethical and legal. On the ethical side, education and intercultural studies have addressed plagiarism critically, not only as a means to improve academic ethics policies (PlagiarismAdvice.org, 2008), but mainly to demonstrate that if anything the concept of plagiarism is far from being universal (Howard & Robillard, 2008). Even if differently, Howard (1995) and Scollon (1994, 1995) argued, and Angèlil-Carter (2000) and Pecorari (2008) later emphasised that the concept of plagiarism cannot be studied on the grounds that one definition is clearly understandable by everyone. Scollon (1994, 1995), for example, claimed that authorship attribution is particularly a problem in non-native writing in English, and so did Pecorari (2008) in her comprehensive analysis of academic plagiarism. If among higher education students plagiarism is often a problem of literacy, with prior, conflicting social discourses that may interfere with academic discourse, as Angèlil-Carter (2000) demonstrates, we then have to aver that a distinction should be made between intentional and inadvertent plagiarism: plagiarism should be prosecuted when intentional, but if it is part of the learning process and results from the plagiarist’s unfamiliarity with the text or topic it should be considered ‘positive plagiarism’ (Howard, 1995: 796) and hence not an offense. Determining the intention behind the instances of plagiarism therefore determines the nature of the disciplinary action adopted. Unfortunately, in order to demonstrate the intention to deceive and charge students with accusations of plagiarism, teachers necessarily have to position themselves as ‘plagiarism police’, although it has been argued otherwise (Robillard, 2008). Practice demonstrates that in their daily activities teachers will find themselves being required a command of investigative skills and tools that they most often lack. We thus claim that the ‘intention to deceive’ cannot inevitably be dissociated from plagiarism as a legal issue, even if Garner (2009) asserts that generally plagiarism is immoral but not illegal, and Goldstein (2003) makes the same severance. However, these claims, and the claim that only cases of copyright infringement tend to go to court, have recently been challenged, mainly by forensic linguists, who have been actively involved in cases of plagiarism. Turell (2008), for instance, demonstrated that plagiarism is often connoted with an illegal appropriation of ideas. Previously, she (Turell, 2004) had demonstrated by comparison of four translations of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to Spanish that the use of linguistic evidence is able to demonstrate instances of plagiarism. This challenge is also reinforced by practice in international organisations, such as the IEEE, to whom plagiarism potentially has ‘severe ethical and legal consequences’ (IEEE, 2006: 57). What plagiarism definitions used by publishers and organisations have in common – and which the academia usually lacks – is their focus on the legal nature. We speculate that this is due to the relation they intentionally establish with copyright laws, whereas in education the focus tends to shift from the legal to the ethical aspects. However, the number of plagiarism cases taken to court is very small, and jurisprudence is still being developed on the topic. In countries within the Civil Law tradition, Turell (2008) claims, (forensic) linguists are seldom called upon as expert witnesses in cases of plagiarism, either because plagiarists are rarely taken to court or because there is little tradition of accepting linguistic evidence. In spite of the investigative and evidential potential of forensic linguistics to demonstrate the plagiarist’s intention or otherwise, this potential is restricted by the ability to identify a text as being suspect of plagiarism. In an era with such a massive textual production, ‘policing’ plagiarism thus becomes an extraordinarily difficult task without the assistance of plagiarism detection systems. Although plagiarism detection has attracted the attention of computer engineers and software developers for years, a lot of research is still needed. Given the investigative nature of academic plagiarism, plagiarism detection has of necessity to consider not only concepts of education and computational linguistics, but also forensic linguistics. Especially, if intended to counter claims of being a ‘simplistic response’ (Robillard & Howard, 2008). In this paper, we use a corpus of essays written by university students who were accused of plagiarism, to demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of improper paraphrasing in suspect texts has the potential to identify and provide evidence of intention. A linguistic analysis of the corpus texts shows that the plagiarist acts on the paradigmatic axis to replace relevant lexical items with a related word from the same semantic field, i.e. a synonym, a subordinate, a superordinate, etc. In other words, relevant lexical items were replaced with related, but not identical, ones. Additionally, the analysis demonstrates that the word order is often changed intentionally to disguise the borrowing. On the other hand, the linguistic analysis of linking and explanatory verbs (i.e. referencing verbs) and prepositions shows that these have the potential to discriminate instances of ‘patchwriting’ and instances of plagiarism. This research demonstrates that the referencing verbs are borrowed from the original in an attempt to construct the new text cohesively when the plagiarism is inadvertent, and that the plagiarist has made an effort to prevent the reader from identifying the text as plagiarism, when it is intentional. In some of these cases, the referencing elements prove being able to identify direct quotations and thus ‘betray’ and denounce plagiarism. Finally, we demonstrate that a forensic linguistic analysis of these verbs is critical to allow detection software to identify them as proper paraphrasing and not – mistakenly and simplistically – as plagiarism.

Knowledge elicitation and knowledge representation in a large domain with multiple experts

This paper describes the knowledge elicitation and knowledge representation aspects of a system being developed to help with the design and maintenance of relational data bases. The size algorithmic components. In addition, the domain contains multiple experts, but any given expert's knowledge of this large domain is only partial. The paper discusses the methods and techniques used for knowledge elicitation, which was based on a "broad and shallow" approach at first, moving to a "narrow and deep" one later, and describes the models used for knowledge representation, which were based on a layered "generic and variants" approach. © 1995.