DAY ONE
9AM-5PM (LUNCH ON YOUR OWN)
- Your initial entry into a custody case: legal and ethical issues in dealing with parents and attorneys.
- How to choose and develop the various roles you can play in a custody case.
- Setting up the evaluation. The use of a detailed model contract to aid in: understanding and adhering to ethical, statutory and case-law criteria; handling complex confidentiality issues; scheduling scientifically defensible observation scenarios; guiding the collection of home-study, documentary, and collateral-informant data; protecting the current and future use of all of your data.
- How to identify relevant social science research and make sure it is used effectively where it really counts.
- How the legal criteria typically play out in real-life courtroom settings.
- How to differentiate measurements and issues relevant to legal custody as contrasted to those pertinent to physical custody.
- The forty-one essential Critical Targets of a comprehensive evaluation.
- How to think about and measure the impact of a parent’s range of personality styles on a given child at a particular time in that child’s development.
- How to overcome the limitations in interview and observation data.
- The appropriate use of traditional psychological tests and the use of specialized, data-based, custody-relevant tests (the BPS and the PORT).
- Case examples
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DAY TWO
9AM-5PM (LUNCH ON YOUR OWN)
- How to plan and carry out observation sessions that are (1) scientifically
defensible (2) exhaustive with respect to the issues they must address;
(3) able to red-flag parental behavior that is manipulative and/or intimidating;
(4) able to detect verbal and non-verbal behavior of the child that
is not based on that child’s actual interactions with a parent but rather
on manipulative and/or intimidating behavior by the parent(s).
- How to gather information that directly assesses a parent’s childcare
skills.
- How to gather information that reflects a parent’s detailed knowledge
of each child in custody-relevant areas (e.g., knowledge of a child’s
developmental, interpersonal, emotional, educational, and medical needs
as well as the ways in which a child best processes information.
- How to optimize the amount of information that can be gleaned from
a home-visit (or home-study), including safety issues, life-style issues
as well as complex issues like relocation (or “move away” cases).
- How to understand and articulate to a legal decision-maker, both
formal and informal models with which the large amounts of data collected
can be prioritized.
- Case examples.
- How to decide the format to use in writing your report (Is your purpose
therapeutic? Designed to encourage mediation? Part of a bitter adversary
battle?)
- A beginning-to-end listing of the real-life sequence of steps involved
in planning and achieving a comprehensive evaluation.
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DAY THREE
9AM-12 NOON (NON-CREDIT-OPTIONAL) (LUNCH ON YOUR OWN)
- Recognizing the particularly complex or controversial dual relationship issues.
- Effective and ineffective ways to deal with subpoenas, depositions, and test-security issues.
- How to recognize cross-examination strategies that are particularly useful.
- How to recognize situations in which your data are likely to radically shift within either short-term or long-term time intervals i.e., learn to differentiate between possible test-retest changes that are due to errors of measurement as opposed to changes due to actual shifts in the variables measured.
- The single best way to get new referrals.
- How to set fees and collect them.
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