The Development and Validation of an Actuarial Risk Assessment Tool for the Prediction of First-Time Offending.
For prevention purposes, it is important that police officers can estimate the risk for delinquency among juveniles who were involved in a criminal offense, but not in the role of a suspect. In the present study, the Youth Actuarial Risk Assessment Tool for First-Time Offending (Y-ARAT-FO) was developed based solely on police records with the aim to enable Dutch police officers to predict the risk for first-time offending. For the construction of this initial screening instrument, an Exhaustive Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (Exhaustive CHAID) analysis was performed on a data set that was retrieved from the Dutch police system. The Y-ARAT-FO was developed on a sample of 1,368 juveniles and validated on a different sample of 886 juveniles showing moderate predictive accuracy in the validation sample (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC] = .728). The predictive accuracy of the Y-ARAT-FO was considered sufficient to justify its use as an initial screening instrument by the Dutch police.
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands M.Assink@UvA.nl.
Mark
M
Assink
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Claudia E
CE
van der Put
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Geert Jan J M
GJ
Stams
D000206:Actuarial Analysis; D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003415:Crime / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007604:Juvenile Delinquency / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000523:psychology* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D009426:Netherlands; D016495:Police; D012372:ROC Curve; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
CHAID analysis; actuarial risk assessment; first-time offending; juvenile delinquency; screening