PSYC 395 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Risk Assessment, Endangerment, Protective Factor

• School: Athabasca University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 395
• Professor: Bob Brandes

Document Summary

The base rate problem: base rate: represents the percentage of people within a given population who commit a criminal or violent act. Although these generate much media coverage, they occur infrequently. Any attempt to predict which individual youths might engage in a school shooting would result in many youths being wrongly classified as school shooters. It is easier to predict frequent events than infrequent events. A history of risk assessment: before 1966: minimal attention given to accuracy of assessing risk of violence, 1960s: civil rights concerns prompted an opportunity to study accuracy of professionals predicting violence, e. g. Methodological issues: risk assessment assumes risk can be measured, measurement assumes that an instrument exists to measure that risk, it is not ethically feasible to release high-risk offenders into the community to measure this. Issue #3: how the criterion variable is defined: in some studies, researchers classify participants as having engaged in violence or not.