TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2014//
TI  - The MATS-1 Risk Assessment Scale: summary of methodological concerns and an empirical validation
JO  - Sexual abuse: a journal of research and treatment
A1  - Helmus, Leslie
A1  - Thornton, David
SP  - 160
EP  - 186
VL  - 28
IS  - 3
N2  - Recently, Wollert and colleagues proposed that sex offender recidivism estimates should be stratified by age and they developed an age-stratified scale called the MATS-1 (Multisample Age-Stratified Table of Sexual Recidivism). The purpose of this article is to highlight concerns with the development of the MATS-1 and to validate the scale using 3,510 sex offenders from 14 unique samples. Concerns with the scale's development fall into three categories: approximations leading to considerable loss of precision, absence of appropriate statistical tests, and the use of inappropriate statistical techniques. The predictive accuracy of the MATS-1 (Area Under the Curve [AUC] =.663) was significantly lower than Static-99R (AUC =.708). The MATS-1 also significantly underestimated recidivism for some offenders. Both the relative and absolute predictive properties of the MATS-1 were not stable across samples. We conclude that the MATS-1 is not appropriate to use for applied risk assessment. Proposals are made for alternate ways to develop risk scales using the age-stratification method.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 1079-0632
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1079063214529801
ID  - ref1
ER  -