Psy expert evidence in the family courts the potential for corpus-assisted analysis

Abstract

This article introduces corpus-assisted linguistic methods as anexploratory means of analysing expert psychologists’ reports used in public familylaw (child protection) cases. Analysis of this dataset is a new application for corpuslinguistics (CL) and the primary purpose of this article is to explore viability andpotential for its future research using CL as a core method. For this study we havecreated and analysed a 25 single-text-type specialised written corpus consisting of25 expert psychologists’ reports (the Psychology Report Corpus “PRC-25”). Thereports are a random sample selected from a population of all psychologists’reports held in Cafcass files over a 10-year period, representing the first corpusof its kind in a currently under-researched area. Our study uses both an inductive(data-driven) approach to identify significant themes and topics in the reports,and a deductive (legal-intuitive) approach to explore psychologists’ use of legallysignificant terms, especially risk of and significant harm. We also explore thepossibility for using this new methodological protocol to triangulate analysisof a larger and representative corpus of expert psychologists’ reports, and thepossibilities for corpus-driven analysis of the genre of written expert evidence texttypes more generally.