A Review of 'Body Farm' Research Facilities Across America with a Focus on Policy and the Impacts When Dealing with Decompositional Changes in Human Remains

Abstract

In the current research study, the use of content analysis and secondary data analysis provided the exploratory research on the “body farm” research facilities across the United States. Open-ended survey questions were also utilized and sent to the six research facilities across the country. The use of open-ended survey questions in combination with a small sample size, resulted in only one institution participating in the survey and one facility actively declining to participate. To resolve this limitation, the use of secondary data and content analysis from facility publications and websites were utilized to complete some of the gaps resulting from the lack of survey responses. In the findings, there are several commonalities in the general policies of body donation and security, but differences were observed in certain specific aspects of the body donation process and in the types of research being generated by the different facilities.