Tamara L. F.
De Beuf, PhD
Bio
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement in Amsterdam. I am part of a large-scale and longitudinal research program that evaluates the implementation and effectiveness of alternative sentencing. Additionally, I am a research fellow at the Leuven Institute of Criminology and Criminological and Experimental Legal Psychology Lab (CELL) at KU Leuven, and at the Amsterdam Laboratory for Legal Psychology at VU Amsterdam.
Education
In 2011, I obtained a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Ghent University, Belgium. Inspired by an internship with the Belgian federal police, I decided to specialize in forensic psychology. I started a master in Forensic Psychology at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, from which I graduated in 2013.
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During this two-year master program, I spent one year in Toronto, Canada, where I completed a clinical and research internship at the forensic mental health program of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s leading mental health research hospital.
PhD Project
In 2016, I started a PhD position at Maastricht University which I combined with my position as project manager and risk assessment trainer at Pactum, a secure youth care service in the Netherlands. As project coordinator, it was my responsibility to integrate structured risk assessment into the service's treatment procedures. The Short-Term Assessment of Risk and Treatability: Adolescent Version (START:AV), a risk assessment instrument for adolescents, was translated into Dutch and implemented within the service.
The related PhD project involved a comprehensive examination of the implementation process using measures and frameworks from the field of implementation science. Additionally, the psychometric properties of the instrument were evaluated to gauge how well the START:AV was performing within this specific setting and under real-life circumstances.
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Prof. dr. Corine de Ruiter and Prof. dr. Vivienne de Vogel supervised the doctoral project. In April 2022, I successfully defended my dissertation titled 'Risk Assessment with the START:AV in Dutch Secure Youth Care: From Implementation to Field Evaluation'.
Research Interests
I am interested in how professionals who are involved in the criminal justice system make decisions and how these decisions may be erroneously influenced by task-irrelevant information. For example, which cognitive biases influence forensic (technical & psychological) experts? What contributes to error (noise & bias) in violence risk assessments?
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Additionally, I am interested in the admission and use of psychological assessment instruments in court as well as the occurrence of wrongful convictions and the factors that may contribute to this, such as cognitive biases among experts.
Research Values
In my work, the applicability of research findings and their relevance for practitioners are paramount. I am attentive to implementation issues (e.g., my PhD project) and strive for accessible science communication. For example, the findings of my doctoral research were communicated to secure youth care services and practitioners via this information leaflet. These values also translate into my work as editor-in-chief of the online peer-reviewed magazine In-Mind that aims to make psychological science accessible to a broad audience.
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Lastly, I embrace open science practices and the preregistration of studies, and I value (adversarial) collaboration. My Open Science Framework page can be accessed here.