Assessment of Child Physical and Sexual Abuse Offenders

A variety of techniques have been used to evaluate offender characteristics thought to be related to child maltreatment. Current assessment approaches include the use of interviews, observations, general personality measures, and offender specific measures. Evaluations are needed for a variety of purposes, which include screening, report confirmation, treatment planning, treatment evaluation, and recidivism prediction. However, there is often a paucity of data on the appropriateness of using existing assessment techniques in each of the different evaluation situations. Because most child protective services providers and many health professionals use interviews and observational techniques to evaluate parents, this article will begin with a description of these approaches and associated problems, such as interviewer bias. Given the increasing use of standardized personality measures, particularly by psychologists (Straus, 1993), and the relatively recent development of offender specific measures, the present review will focus on some of the most frequently used standardized and specialized offender assessment approaches. To the extent possible, psychometric data presented will include reliability and validity information, including individual classification rates (correct classifications of offender status sensitivity , correct classifications of nonoffender status specificity, misclassifications of offender status false negative classifications , and misclassifications of nonoffender status false positive classifications ). INTERVIEWS In most cases, the interview procedure attempts to assess offender characteristics using a question and answer format. In structured interviews, information is gathered through a planned process, where an effort is made to systematically ask questions about different domains of interest (e.g., risk factors). Structured interviews, which tend to generate more reliable data than unstructured interviews, have been developed to assess individual characteristics, such as depression (Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression; Hamilton, 1986) and how parents view their children (e.g., Altemeier, O'Connor, Vietze, Sandler, & Sherrod, 1982; Kelly, 1983; Murphy, Orkow, & Nicola, 1985). The success of the structured interview depends upon a variety of factors (Milner, 1991d). General training in interviewing techniques and specific training in the evaluation of the characteristics of interest (e.g., depression, parental expectations) are needed. The interviewer must establish rapport with the client, and must adhere to the recommended interview structure, which at times may be difficult because the interview process is interactive. A criticism of interview procedures is that they frequently have lower reliability and validity than objective tests. Never-the-less, some argue that the interview process has the advantage of allowing for idiographic assessment, in that the interviewer can deviate from the planned format to obtain personality data unique to the individual. In child maltreatment assessment, there is a paucity of research on the predictive power of interviewing procedures in offender evaluations. Recently, however, there has been an interest in evaluator bias in child abuse assessment. Research suggests that factors unrelated to the abuse event can impact child maltreatment evaluations and/or reporting decisions made during the interview. For example, in a national sample, Nuttall and Jackson (1994) found that professionals (i.e., clinical social workers, pediatricians, psychiatrists, and psychologists) who had been sexually and/or physically abused as children were more likely to believe allegations of child sexual abuse. The findings did not vary by discipline. In terms of personal beliefs about the veracity of children's reports of sexual abuse, Kendall-Tackett and Watson (1991) found that professionals who believed that children do not lie about sexual abuse, compared to those who were neutral, were more likely to be convinced by case data that child sexual abuse had occurred. …