title: It was not me: attribution of blame for criminal acts in psychiatric offenders.
abstract: The current article addresses the psychometric qualities of the German Version of Gudjonsson's Blame Attribution Inventory (GBAI), a self-report scale for measuring attribution of blame for crime. The GBAI was administered to a criminal sample of forensic and criminal inmates (n=107). Findings indicate that the German version of the Gudjonsson Blame Attribution Inventory possesses acceptable test-retest stability and good internal consistency. Factor analysis reproduced the three basic dimensions of the GBAI: external attribution, mental-element attribution, and guilt-feeling attribution. Forensic patients had higher mental-element attribution and guilt-feeling attribution scores than the prison inmates. Interestingly, sexual offenders who were prisoners, showed the lowest guilt-feeling attribution, while sexual offenders who were forensic patients had the highest guilt-feeling attribution scores. Since earlier research reported a tendency of faking good in sexual offenders, we suggest that the forensic sexual offenders may demonstrate a social desirable response tendency in an attempt to gain sympathy and/or earlier parole. All in all, our data show that the German version of the GBAI is a valuable tool for measuring attributional styles of offenders.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical, Clinical and Experimental Psychology, Maastricht University, Universiteitssingel 50, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. maaike.cima@DMKEP.unimaas.nl
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cima
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Merckelbach
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Butt
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kremer
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Knauer
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Schellbach-Matties
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005555:Forensic Psychiatry / Q000295:instrumentation*; D005858:Germany; D006167:Guilt; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D011329:Prisoners / Q000523:psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods; D011902:Rape / Q000523:psychology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012941:Social Responsibility; D014754:Violence / Q000523:psychology