RESEARCH TITLE: Sources and Impact of Stress in Forensic Decision-Making

Abstract: Workplace stress has been shown to impact expert decision-making in a variety of domains, such as medicine, aviation, and policing. Forensic examiners, who operate in a highly stressful environment, provide critical decisions to assist in intelligence-led policing and/or legal proceedings. Yet, there is a lack in the evidence-base in understanding workplace stress as a potential factor affecting decision-making in forensic science. Therefore, the main aims of the present PhD thesis are twofold: (a) to obtain further empirical data to better identify and evaluate the sources of workplace stress in forensic science, and (b) to experimentally study the impact of stress on judgments that are made in the forensic science workplace. To acquire a more holistic understanding of these two key challenges, a mixed approach was undertaken by investigating the experiences (questionnaires) and behaviour (experiments) of forensic examiners.