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12 Psych. Inj. & L. 1 (2019)

handle is hein.journals/psyinjl12 and id is 1 raw text is: Psychological Injury and Law (2019) 12:1-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/si2207-019-09347-9 CrossMark Forensic Thinking in Disability Assessment: an Introduction to a Special Issue Benjamin J. Lovett' - Allyson G. Harrison2 Received: 11 January 2019 /Accepted: 16 January 2019 /Published online: 31 January 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Keywords Disability - Assessment The practice of forensic psychology is often associated with prison populations, court-ordered evaluations, and psychologists testifying to judges or juries. This associ- ation is understandable; those are important aspects of forensic practice. However, the scope of forensic prac- tice is larger than this popular conception suggests; the American Psychological Association's (2013) Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychology defines forensic work as professional practice by any psychologist... when applying the scientific, technical, or specialized knowledge of psychology to the law to assist in ad- dressing legal, contractual, and administrative matters. Furthermore, the Guidelines apply in all matters in which psychologists provide expertise to judicial, ad- ministrative, and educational systems (p. 7). A great deal of clinical work, then, actually has a forensic as- pect to it; specifically in the context of disability assess- ment, a psychologist performs forensic work when de- termining whether a client meets legal or administrative standards for provision of disability services. Arguably, when working with a private client who intends to pro- vide evaluation results to an administrative or education- al institution, the psychologist is also performing foren- sic work, if a bit less directly. In addition, many psy- chological evaluations that do not start out as forensic are nonetheless used later in legal proceedings; diagnos- ticians who merely conclude that disorders are present need to later compose declaration statements, complete W Benjamin J. Lovett Benjamin.Lovett@cortland.edu Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Cortland, 132 Old Main, Cortland, NY 13045, USA 2 Queen's University, Kingston, Canada depositions, or testify in court when their diagnostic conclusions become relevant to a legal issue. For in- stance, a clinician who diagnoses ADHD may not make explicit legal claims about disability standards or enti- tlements in the report, but if the client is denied ADHD- related accommodations at school and then sues the school, the evaluator's report is an evidentiary exhibit and the evaluator will often be involved in the lawsuit in some capacity (as a witness to events, and possibly as a testifying expert). In addition to forensic work having a scope broad enough to cover many activities related to disability assessment, fo- rensic psychologists have developed a general perspective on assessment that is useful outside of forensic settings. It is this contribution that we refer to generally as forensic thinking: approaching a case as a forensic psychologist would, viewing all of the evidence in an objective, impartial, critical manner, and considering the inclusion of assessment tools that reflect that perspective. In some ways, this perspective embodies the care and reflectiveness that is a feature of all high-quality clinical work. Excellent clinicians are cautious in drawing inferences from data, and display a scientific skepticism toward any single piece of data. Suhr (2015, p. 5) sums up this approach well in her recent textbook on clinical assessment: Like the detective viewing evidence through the lens of the magnifying glass, an assessor must view the data at hand through various lenses, knowing when to focus in and take a closer look, and knowing when the infor- mation has no clinical value...The assessor also needs to become aware of when his or her lenses have become biased in some way and take appropriate steps to ad- dress that bias. t Springer

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