Seattle University Collaborative Projects - International Academy of ...

offender recidivism. Sexual offender risk assessments need to be conducted with up-to-datetechniques, based on solid statistical underpinnings, and have relevance to the questions posedby a given court. This presentation will provide both an overview of the fundamental principlesof sexual offender risk prediction, and a tie-in to the integration of statistical principles to otherforms of sexual offender assessment which bear upon an analysis of the offender's presentvolitional control. Program objectives: 1) participants will understand both the recent history ofsexual offender assessment, and the diverse legal/political/cultural emphases that affect sexualoffender litigation; 2) participants will gain knowledge about effective sexual offenderassessment, focusing on statistical principles; and 3) participants will become knowledgeableabout recidivism rates, and how differing interpretations of the rates affect assessmentconclusions (as well as prosecutorial opinion).Getting the Balance Right: Structuring Structured Professional Judgment inSexual Reoffense Risk and AssessmentJeffrey C. Singer, Morris Psychological Group, P.A., Parsippany, USA(drsinger@morrispsych.com)There are three general methods to assess sexual reoffense risk. For the past 40 years,unstructured, or unguided, clinical judgment (UCJ) has been shown to be an inaccurate methodto make diagnoses or judgments and typically creates false positive results (Janus & Meehl,1997). A false positive is concluding that a condition exists when it does not. UCJ has beenreferred to as “subjective and impressionistic” (Grove & Meehl, 1996) as well as “unrestrained”(Wollert, 2007). Such approaches have poor inter-rater reliability and are vulnerable to varioussources of error including the Fundamental Attribution Error as well as various forms ofcognitive heuristics, i.e., thinking short cuts when faced with complex tasks.Another method to accomplish this kind of evaluation is the actuarial approach. True actuarialassessment eliminates the potential error and bias of human judgment. This approach considers asmall number of variables with the application of explicit statistical rules for combining andweighing a few variables into a total risk tally. Actuarial assessment can be used for riskassessment with caution given its apparent limitations in being able to apply such tallies to aparticular individual as opposed to groups. (Cooke, 2010, Cooke & Michie, 2009; Hart, Michie,Cooke, 2007; Vrieze & Grove, 2007; but see also Mossman, 2007 & 2008).A variant of the actuarial is the adjusted-actuarial approach, which uses an actuarial startingpoint and risk is adjusted up or down based on other risk factors. Research (Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2009) has borne out that this is not an acceptable method as it creates error from themixing of two completely different approaches of assessment. The effects of the cognitiveheuristic of anchoring further compounds the error rate with an adjusted-actuarial approach.A third approach to assess sexual recidivism risk is the empirically guided, clinical method,which has also been called structured professional judgment (SPJ; Douglas & Skeem, 2005) orguided professional judgment (GPJ; Lieberman et. al., 2007). The SPJ method relies on assessingrisk factors and symptom variables that have been found repeatedly in the empirical literature291