Citation

Harris GT, Rice ME, Cormier CA. Crim. Justice Behav. 2013; 40(11): 1349-1362.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0093854813492959

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R) is an important predictor of violent behavior and is widely used to make important decisions about forensic clients. Some research casts doubt on whether the scoring of the PCL-R in clinical practice matches that attained in research and, therefore, whether the use of the PCL-R is warranted in high-stakes decisions. We examined scoring correspondence of the PCL-R in 58 offenders where scoring by trained clinicians was compared with that by a very experienced researcher whose scoring was of known predictive validity (or with a student supervised by this experienced researcher). Research and clinical scorers showed good agreement (Spearman's rank order correlation =.85; intraclass correlation coefficient =.79, absolute agreement for single measures), especially on those parts of the PCL-R that are most consistently and robustly associated with violence. We conclude that trained clinicians can achieve acceptable reliability and validity when scoring the PCL-R, especially for risk assessment.

Keywords: Juvenile justice

Language: en