The Relevancy-Focused Report: An Alternative Model Format for Forensic Psychological Reports

Traditional report formats commonly employed to summarize forensic mental health evaluations pose several limitations, including that they implicitly encourage inclusion of irrelevant data and only data that are consistent with one’s opinions and discourage writers from explicitly distinguishing between case data, their inferences, and their reasoning. To remedy these issues, we propose a relevancy-focused (RF) report format, which is a findings-based report style developed specifically for use when summarizing results of forensic psychological evaluations. We describe a practical guide to the critical thinking and rhetorical writing embodied in the RF.