As a forensic practitioner, you want to make accurate, confident and defensible decisions.
In many cases you have behavioral data (priors, offense characteristics) but sometimes you need to estimate latent unobservable traits. This toolkit is intended to aid with this efficiently, but with precision – easy to administer, quick to score (zero or one), and simple to interpret to evaluate client characteristics.
Many correctional interventions now target general strengths and deficits, even for those with sexual convictions. They have clear inclusion and exclusion criteria, often based on comprehensive risk and needs assessments. Many also allow their clinicians considerable flexibility in content and delivery.
Steven Gillespie and I have developed a series of scales and screens are designed to support that clinical discretion. They are not designed to be administered as a battery. They are not designed to answer the question, “Does my client have a pathological strength/deficit in this domain?” Instead, they are designed to aid in-program decision-making in-the-moment – to answer, “Would my client benefit from clinical input in this domain.”
Not every scale and screen in the Toolkit is equal. Some are more precise than others – they are more “signal” and less “noise”. Some better represent their original scale than others – they are purer short versions. Some measure the whole distribution of the construct, whereas some measure only parts of the distribution – they can tell you “how much”, not just “high” or “low”. Some are free of response bias and others are not – they can be used with any client under most circumstances without caveat.
As a consequence, for each scale we provide a letter grade that represents the overall quality. It should be noted that all scales included in the Toolkit meet a minimum criteria that they predict over 60% of the variance with fewer items and have adequate internal consistency (reliability meets 0.60). This grading system is a means to communicate the quality of each relative to the others. No scale is “bad”: a screen with a D grade still provides unique clinical utility. Also, many of these screens contain less than half of the original items: trade-offs with efficient clinical time are considered too.
The Toolkit will become available as soon as we have permissions in place to publish!
