Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Psychometric Analysis Of Forensic Examiner Behavior, Amanda Luby, A. Mazumder, B. Junker

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Works

Forensic science often involves the comparison of crime-scene evidence to a known-source sample to determine if the evidence and the reference sample came from the same source. Even as forensic analysis tools become increasingly objective and automated, final source identifications are often left to individual examiners’ interpretation of the evidence. Each source identification relies on judgements about the features and quality of the crime-scene evidence that may vary from one examiner to the next. The current approach to characterizing uncertainty in examiners’ decision-making has largely centered around the calculation of error rates aggregated across examiners and identification tasks, without taking …