VALIDATION AND REVISION OF THE MULTIDIMENSIONAL ASSESSMENT OF SEX AND AGGRESSION

The Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression (the MASA) was initially created to supplement the often poorly represented information in the archival records of sex offenders and to provide sufficient data to classify adult sex offenders. It has now been revised four times, expanding the breadth of its assessment, simplifying its language to make it appropriate for juveniles, and computerizing its administration. This article summarizes some of the recent reliability and validity analyses that have been calculated on a wide variety of samples including college students, community noncriminals, non-sex offending criminals, and adult and juvenile sex offenders. Continued reliability and cross-sample stability of factor structures and the intercorrelations across I its scales suggest that the inventory shows promise as a useful assessment instrument for sex offenders. This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. I,#, 1% , . -. -I Assessment of Sex and Aggression 3 Validation and Revision of the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression The high prevalence of sexual aggression (Koss, Woodruff, & Koss, 1991; Wyatt, 1992) and the seriousness of the consequences of such aggression to its victims (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1974; Hanson, 1990) are well documented. The , widespread concern of society about sexual aggression is reflected in the numerous legislative initiatives that have been directed at reducing its incidence. Recent legislation has created sexual predator laws, required community notification about high risk offenders, and mandated the treatment of offenders (Grubin & Prentky, 1993; Prentky, 1996). Adequate implementation of such directives requires a solid foundation in the assessment and prediction of sexual aggression. The goals of enhancing our ability to identify potential sex offenders and to assess the risk of re-offending of known offenders, of making adequate dispositional decisions about convicted offenders, of identifying and treating the specific deficits of sex offenders, of evaluating the efficacy of intervention techniques, and of predicting recidivism all depend on the adequacy of our theoretical models and our ability to assess the critical domains of sexual aggression reliably and validly. If we are going to progress toward achieving these goals, we need to identify or develop a standardized, assessment instrument for sex offenders that can guide adjudication, serve the function of preand post-treatment evaluation, and provide the data for valid risk assessments and predictions of recidivism. It is critical that that this assessment inventory or battery not only be reliable and valid and have adequate standardized norms, but also that it be comprehensive and easily administered and This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. , Assessment of Sex and Aggression 4 processed, so that it will be widely used. The generation of a model of sexual aggression that will be useful for guiding decisions requires the analysis of multiple domains, measured on sufficiently large samples. The extensive use of an efficient, reliable, valid, standardized multivariate assessment tool would contribute substantially to the establishment of data bases required to generate such a model. The option of adapting existing, well standardized inventories to serve this evaluation need has not proven viable. Although the major self-report inventories that are currently available (e.g., MMPI-2, MCMI, MSI) are appropriate for and helpful with the assessments for which they were created, they are suboptimal for the assessment of sex offenders, because they do not assess the most critical sexual aggression domains (see Knight, Rosenberg, & Schneider, 1985; Prentky & Knight, 1991). Each of these major assessment instruments has its own distinct advantages, but is also burdened with significant disadvantages that compromise its utility for this purpose. The MMPI, which is the most frequently studied psychometric instrument for sex offenders and other criminal populations (see Gearing, 1979; Knight et al., 1985), provides a rich source of empirically validated data for comparative purposes and contains the most extensively researched scales for faking good and bad. Unfortunately, large numbers of sex offenders produce profiles that match non-offender groups (Marshall & Hall, 1995), and within clearly defined subgroups of sex offenders MMPI profiles have been characterized more by their heterogeneity than by their similarities (Erickson, Luxenberg, Walbek, & Seely, 1987; Hall, Maiuro, Vitaliano, & Proctor, 1986; Marshall & Hall, 1995). Moreover, cluster analytic studies of sex offenders have yielded inconsistent results across studies (Anderson, Kunce, & Rich, This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. I . __ __. -I Assessment of Sex and Aggression 5 1979; Kalichman, Szymanowski, McKee, Taylor, & Craig, 1989; Schlank, 1995; Shealy, Kalichman, Henderson, Szymanowski, & McKee, 1991), and when types have emerged, they have often pooled subjects with quite different offense histories (Marshall & Hall, 1995). The MCMl has fared somewhat better than the MMPl with sex offenders. It is , sensitive to the antisocial and narcissistic features that are so prevalent in correctional settings (McNeil & Meyer, 1990), and it has scales that show the same stability for sex offenders as other deviant populations (Langevin et al., 1988). It has yielded some meaningful cluster groupings of sexual offenders (Bard & Knight, 1986), and the factor structure of the responses crf an inmate sample approximated those found in clinical populations (Langevin et al., 1988). Moreover, some differences among both adult and juvenile sex offender groups on the MCMl parallel the differences found in previous diagnostic literature (Carpenter, Peed, & Eastman, 1995; Chantry & Craig, 1994). Regretfully, only a handful of studies using the MCMl with sexual offenders have been carried out, and it shares with the MMPl and the MSI the general difficulties that we discuss below. I,* , The MSI has the distinct advantage of providing information about sexual behavior and pathology not tapped by traditional psychological tests. The scales of the MSI have shown fair internal consistencies in independent assessments of the instrument (Kalichman, Henderson, Sheaiy, & Dwyer, 1992), and its test-retest reliabilities range from . 64 to . 92 over a 21-day period (Nichols & Molinder, 1984). Importantly, some of its scales have been related to improvement in sex offender treatment programs (Minor, Marques, Day, & Nelson, 1990; Simkins, Ward, Bowman, & This document is a research report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice. This report has not been published by the Department. Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.