Monday 11 March 2013

Expert psychologist: Exploring quality

Research at the University of Central Lancashire has now been made available online detailing the wide variation in quality of expert psychologist reports. According to the research: "Results indicated wide variability in report quality with evidence of unqualified experts being instructed to provide psychological opinion. One fifth of instructed psychologists were not deemed qualified on the basis of their submitted Curriculum Vitae, even on the most basic of applied criteria. Only around one tenth of instructed experts maintained clinical practice external to the provision of expert witness work. Two thirds of the reports reviewed were rated as „poor‟ or „very poor‟, with one third between good and excellent (Ireland, Pinschoff and Trainor, 2012)". The full report, as a pdf, can be found at: http://www.uclan.ac.uk/news/files/FINALVERSIONFEB2012.pdf