Measuring the Frequency Occurrence of Handwriting and Handprinting Characteristics, |
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| Authors: | Mark E. Johnson Ph.D. Thomas W. Vastrick B.S. Michèle Boulanger Ph.D. Ellen Schuetzner B.A. |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Statistics, and Joint Appointment, National Center for Forensic Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL;2. Forensic Document Examiner, D‐ABFDE, Private Practice, Orlando, FL;3. Department of Business, Rollins College and President of JISC, Inc., Winter Park, FL;4. Forensic Document Examiner, D‐ABFDE, Private Practice, Chicago, IL |
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| Abstract: | The premise of this study was to take a valid population sampling of handwriting and handprinting and assess how many times each of the predetermined characteristic is found in the samples. Approximately 1500 handwriting specimens were collected from across the United States and pared to obtain a representative sample of the U.S. adult population according to selected demographics based on age, sex, ethnicity, handedness, education level, and location of lower‐grade school education. This study has been able to support a quantitative assessment of extrinsic and intrinsic effects in handwriting and handprinting for the six subgroups. Additional results include analyses of the interdependence of characteristics. This study found that 98.55% of handprinted characteristics and 97.39% of cursive characteristics had an independence correlation of under 0.2. The conclusions support use of the product rule in general, but with noted caveats. Finally, this study provides frequency occurrence proportions for 776 handwriting and handprinting characteristics. |
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| Keywords: | forensic science proportions frequency occurrence handwriting cursive handprinting product rule attribute agreement analysis questioned documents |
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