ABSTRACT
Objective: Clinical reasoning as an essential skill for psychiatrists, especially in forensic psychiatry, relies on their thinking and decision-making skills. However, not all psychiatrists are aware of their decision-making styles. This study examines the validity and reliability of the Indonesian translation of the Decision Style Scale (DSS) instrument among general psychiatrists in the Indonesian forensic psychiatry setting. Method: This is a cross-sectional study involving 32 general psychiatrists from all nine psychiatric residency training centers in Indonesia. The study was conducted between August 2020 and February 2021. The translation process involved certified independent translators. The validity was tested using Item-Level Content Validity Index (I-CVI), Scale-Level Level Content Validity Index (S-CVI), and item-total correlation. Internal consistency reliability was measured using Cronbach's alpha. Results: After translation, the instrument was sent back and received feedback from the original authors of DSS. The final version of DSS was valid with an I-CVI score of 0.84-1 and an S-CVI score of 0.99. All but one item had a corrected item-total correlation of more than 0.30. The reliability test of DSS also showed acceptable results with Cronbach's alpha values of 0.43-0.83, and an overall internal consistency score of 0.83 and 0.62 for intuitive and rational scales, respectively. Conclusion: DSS serves as a valid, reliable, and readily-available tool to measure psychiatrists' decision-making styles in forensic psychiatry settings. Enhancing psychiatrists' awareness of their decision-making styles may help in mitigating the risk of bias in forensic psychiatry evaluations.
ABSTRACT
Forensic psychiatrists are often sought by the court of law to provide professional opinion on specific legal matters that have a major impact on the evaluee and possibly society at large. The quality of that opinion and recommendations rely on the quality of the analysis from the assessment results conducted by the psychiatrist. However, the definition and scope of a forensic psychiatric analysis is not clear. While existing literature on forensic psychiatric analysis generally includes organizing information, identifying relevant details, and formulating a set of forensic psychiatric opinions as components, there is no explicit and unified definition of these terms and process. This lack of clarity and guidelines may hinder forensic psychiatry from achieving its goal of providing objective information to the court or other relevant parties. Forensic psychiatric analysis exhibits numerous parallels to clinical reasoning in other fields of medicine. Therefore, this review aims to elaborate forensic psychiatric analysis through the lens of clinical reasoning, which has been developed by incorporating advances in cognitive sciences. We describe forensic psychiatric analysis through three prominent clinical reasoning theories: hypothetico-deductive model, illness script theory, and dual process theory. We expand those theories to elucidate how forensic psychiatrists use clinical reasoning not only to diagnose mental disorders, but also to determine mental capacities as requested by law. Cognitive biases are also described as potential threat to the accuracy of the assessment and analysis. Additionally, situated cognition theory helps elucidate how contextual factors influence risk of errors. Understanding the processes involved in forensic psychiatric analysis and their pitfalls can assist forensic psychiatrists to be aware of and try to mitigate their bias. Debiasing strategies that have been implemented in other fields of medicine to mitigate errors in clinical reasoning can be adapted for forensic psychiatry. This may also shape the training program of general psychiatrists and forensic psychiatrists alike.