How To Write A Psychology Report

I'm Dr. Eldad Farhy, I'm a counselling and psychotherapeutic psychologist. I was a psychology expert at College UK, and today, I will be talking about psychology.

How to write a psychology report depends very much on the type of report you want to write. If you're writing it for a university course, then you have to write something very much like an essay, and you should follow the guidelines that you've been given and that you've been practicing in writing essays to get to the place you're in. If we are speaking about the most specific, really psychological reports, we're probably talking about either a therapy report or a letter to our GP sort of report or perhaps the more specialized, medical-legal type of psychology report.

The first one is more simple, basically having an interview with the individual, you form an idea, we call it a formulation of the problem besetting that person and the causes and possibly some treatment that can be followed. You write this in the shape or form of a letter, if it's sent outside, perhaps a longer one to three pages in which you set out the information, the background information you have collected, the type of problems that have been reported, the understanding that you made of why those problems came to be, and of course, what are your suggestions for treatment and for progress. If you're writing a medical-legal type of psychological report, this is very much the same, but much more meticulous.

It can be several pages long. I've personally written up to fifty pages in complex cases. What happens there, that is, yes, you follow the same methodology, you interview the person, but then you'd probably introduce several formal tests both of psychological and of cognitive issues, which will enable you to cover specific information which is relevant to the purpose for the report.

The information you have gathered, both in the interview section and by testing would be combined in order explain or to report on the state of the individual tested and interviewed. That report will be written in the form and following the procedures that apply to the place and to how you're preparing those. That is, legal requirements in the UK would dictate a different type of report to those in the States.

Once you have followed that, you have prepared a psychological report. One last point you'll have to keep in mind is to follow also the ethical guidelines of your organization. That is, you ought not to prepare a report in an area which you don't have sufficient expertise; you should always make clear, in your report, what is your opinion, what information you've verified, and what is hearsay.

And you should, of course, make sure that in your reports that you stick to the truth. Just because someone pays you, does not mean that you can tell a story that they want to hear; you have to be faithful to the principles that your organization puts in its ethical standards. If you follow those guidelines, you'll have a valued psychological report. .