ABSTRACT
Forensic Document Examiners (FDEs) are commonly asked to determine whether or not a disputed body of writing or signature was written by a particular person. Beginning in the 1990s, several studies were undertaken in an attempt to determine whether FDEs possessed expertise at this task when compared to the ability of Laypersons. An area of research that had not yet been addressed was how difficult it would be to differentiate writing by different people who wrote very similarly. Motivated by this question, a two-part research project was undertaken by Durina and Caligiuri. The next phase of the study involved distribution of the sets of writing specimens to 49 practicing FDEs in both government and private laboratories in the United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and Finland who had been notified about the study by email, and who had agreed to examine and compare the questioned and known writing specimens in an attempt to determine writer ship.
