Data were collected from 202 male juvenile offenders and 134 male adult offenders incarcerated in secure juvenile and adult (respectively) correctional facilities. The juveniles were between 14 and 17 years of age (M = 15.8, SD = 0.89 at baseline) and the adults were between 26 and 29 years of age (M = 27.5, SD = 1.08 at baseline). These ages reflect policy trends (adolescents may be prosecuted as adults beginning at age 14 in many jurisdictions; adults may be held in the juvenile justice system up to age 25 in some jurisdictions). The sample was ethnically diverse: African American (47%), Hispanic (13%), White (32%), and other (8%). According to institutional records, participants had an average of 6 (SD = 13.9) prior offenses. Procedure Recruitment focused on yielding roughly equal numbers of participants scoring in the “psychopathic” (total >25) and “non- psychopathic” (total <25) range on the PCL:YV and PCL:R (Forth et al., 2003) to ensure adequate representation of participants with high scores. Baseline data were used to monitor the number of “psychopathic” and “non-psychopathic” participants during the recruitment process. Once the desired number of “non- psychopathic” participants was reached (N = 144 for adolescents and N = 82 for adults), a screening interview was implemented to subsequently select only participants in the “psychopathic” range (N = 56 for adolescents and N = 52 for adults) for inclusion in the remainder of the study. Interviewers approached eligible inmates to describe the study and obtain informed consent for those 18 years and older and assent, as well as parent/guardian consent, from minors. Of the participants approached, 11% of youths refused, 4% of parents refused, and 13% of adults refused. After the baseline interview, participants completed follow-up interviews one month, one year, and two years after the baseline. Interviewers read the items of the self-report measures aloud to avoid potential problems with reading comprehension. Participants were paid for their
2000; Modecki, 2008), even within samples of juvenile offenders (Monahan, Steinberg, Cauffman, & Mulvey, 2009). The construct validity of each measure is outlined below. Responsibility. Responsibility was assessed using the personal responsibility scale of the Psychosocial Maturity Inventory (a = .84) (PSMI Form D; Greenberger & Bond, 1976; Green- berger & Sørensen, 1974). Items on the personal responsibility scale tap self-reliance, identity, and work orientation. Self-reliance measures feelings of internal control and the ability to make decisions without extreme reliance on others (e.g., “Luck decides most things that happen to me” [reverse]). Identity measures self-esteem, clarity of the self, and consideration of life goals (e.g., “I change the way I feel and act so often that I sometimes wonder who the ‘real’ me is” [reverse]). Work orientation measures the adolescent’s pride in the successful completion of tasks (e.g., “I hate to admit it, but I give up on my work when things go wrong” [reverse]). These scales each contain 10 items to which subjects respond on a 4-point Likert scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree, with higher scores indicating more responsible behavior. As a scale, the PSMI conforms to its hypothesized factor structure (Greenberger & Sørensen, 1974) and has demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity (Greenberger & Sørensen, 1974; Josselson, Greenberger, & McConochie, 1975). The total score was used as an indicator of responsibility in the current study. Social perspective. The ability to take other people’s perspectives into account was measured using a subscale from the Weinberger Adjustment Inventory (WAI; Weinberger & Schwartz, 1990). The WAI asks participants to describe themselves on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = almost never to 5 = almost always) regarding what they have usually been like or felt like over the past year or more. The 5-item “consideration of others” scale (a= .78) consists of items such as, “before I do something, I think about how it will affect the people around me.” Studies of the
psychopathy (see Skeem et al., 2011), this CU specifier underscores developmental questions about the extent to which “juvenile psychopathy” is a valid construct. Limitations First, as is the case with any longitudinal study of high-risk samples, we were unable to retain all participants over time. To reduce the likelihood that our findings reflected differential attrition, we included analyses (e.g., growth curve analysis; cross- lagged SEM) that use techniques to handle missing data (e.g., FIML). Moreover, for several analyses (e.g., bivariate correlations; ICCs), we applied multiple imputation as an alternate strategy for handling missing data. The pattern of findings was consistent across strategies, which lends confidence to our main conclusions. Second, relative to our adolescent sample (n = 202), the sample (n = 134) was small. The adult sample provided adequate power to examine stability in PCL:R scores over time, but not to detect significant relationships in the cross-lagged model of maturity and PCL:R scores. Finally, adolescents’ baseline PCL:YV scores were higher on average (estimated intercept = 28) than those of adults (estimated intercept = 25). Although the difference is modest (3 points on a 40-point scale), it raises the possibility that regression to the mean may explain some of the greater decrease in adolescents’ than adults’ scores. Finally, the Affective factor dis played low reliability (ICC = .47), which may have contributed to the weak stability displayed by this factor. Confidence in our results may also be provided through com- parison with past longitudinal studies with different designs. Broadly, compared with estimates produced for adults in past research (ICCs = .40-.60, Blonigen et al., 2006; Loney et al., 2007; Rutherford et al., 1999) our stability estimates for adults (ICC = .70) and adolescents (ICC = .32) lie at the upper and lower ends of the distribution, respectively. Our results for adolescents (r = .33) were
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