As a trauma researcher, I found it quite daunting to review this literature. Many research studies that are out there use validated measures of post-traumatic stress disorders. I approached this paper by saying, okay, I have a specific question: I want to know to what extent jurors meet PTSD diagnostic criteria or exhibit symptoms following gruesome evidence. Those were pretty much my search terms.
What I ended up finding was that although a lot of the studies employed standard measures of post-traumatic stress disorder, many of them were modified to such an extent that I was reading them and asking what they meant. When you want to compare this to other PTSD populations, it becomes uncomparable.
Or, for example, they would report prevalence statistics of the diagnosis of PTSD, but you would have no idea of how long the symptoms had been lasting. Some research omitted criterion F from the PTSD diagnosis, which refers to functional impairment: your inability to function at home, at work, or at school. Some studies said the prevalence was 10% of PTSD, but they didn't take into account...they just decided to not measure that. I was like, well, are these people experiencing symptoms to the severity of their lives being disrupted, or is it manageable?
There were just a lot of questions that this literature brought up. If I were to redo it, if I were to do it myself, I would supplement these measures they've used, which are often self-reports in which people rate on a scale of one to whatever how much they experience this. I would supplement that with clinician-led evaluations of post-traumatic stress disorder, using gold standard measures. Many measures can be used to give you an accurate idea of what the issue really is.