NCJ Number
154757
Journal
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology Volume: 62 Issue: 4 Dated: (1994) Pages: 783-792
Date Published
1994
Length
10 pages
Annotation
The author notes that violence prediction occupies a prominent and controversial place in public mental health practice and that productive debate about the validity of violence prediction has been hampered by the use of methods for quantifying accuracy that do not control for base rates or biases in favor of certain outcomes.
Abstract
He describes some of the methodological problems in violence prediction, shows how receiver operating characteristic analysis can be used to solve these problems, and analyzes 58 data sets from 44 published violence prediction studies. Taken together, data from these studies strongly suggest that violence prediction by mental health professionals is substantially more accurate than chance. Short-term violence prediction appears to be no more accurate that long-term violence prediction. Further, past behavior alone appears to be a better long-term predictor of future behavior than clinical judgments and may also be a better indicator than cross-validated actuarial techniques. The author points out that the accuracy of violence assessment has important implications for clinical practice and public policy and that future researchers should be able to provide information about violence prediction accuracy that clarifies clinical and legal decisionmaking. An appendix defines some terms used to describe violence prediction accuracy. 80 references, 4 tables, and 1 figure