The Impact of Structured Violence Tools on Forensic Risk Evaluation
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Assessing the Impact of Structured Violence Tools on Forensic Risk Assessment
IRAS ID
314562
Contact name
Josh Cox
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Birmingham
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 11 months, 29 days
Research summary
Risk assessment and management is a key aspect of treatment in forensic settings. It gives professionals an understanding of how likely a patient is to engage in violence in custody and in the community. Effective risk management has significant implications for patient and public safety.
Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) is an approach to assessment that is used routinely within forensic settings to understand and mitigate the risk of interpersonal violence posed by individual patients. It is an approach that attempts to bridge the gap between approaches that rely on non-discretionary decision making via the use of actuarial tools (actuarial tools provide clinicians with an evidence based probability that a patient will re-offend over a specific period of time based on a range of factors), and approaches that rely on discretionary decision making (or clinical judgement).
A commonly applied SPJ tool, the Historical Clinical Risk-20 (HCR-20) requires clinicians to provide a 'formulation' (a clinical understanding) of a patient's risk. However, there is evidence that this can make the assessment vulnerable to 'cognitive bias' (systematic errors in thinking) which can negatively impact the predictive accuracy of the assessment.
The current study aims to explore whether base-rate probabilities produced by an actuarial tool (The Forensic Violence Oxford, or 'FoVOx') will have an impact on forensic risk evaluations produced by clinician's carrying out the HCR-20. The study will be open to psychologists at the Thames Valley Mental Health Service - Medium Secure Unit. Participants will undergo a 20 minute survey and 1 hour semi-structured interview via Microsoft Teams/Zoom. Participants will be required to answer questions regarding their patient's risk assessment data.
REC name
London - Camberwell St Giles Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/LO/0803
Date of REC Opinion
1 Dec 2022
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion