The Impact of Structured Violence Tools on Forensic Risk Evaluation
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The Impact of Structured Violence Tools on Forensic Risk Evaluation
IRAS ID
326986
Contact name
Josh Cox
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Birmingham
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 5 months, 16 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 solely on non-discretionary decision making via the use of evidence based probabilities that a patient will re-offend over a specific period of time based on a range of factors, and approaches that rely on clinical judgement without reference to probabilities generated by research on forensic populations. SPJ approaches bridge this divide by combining the use of evidence based, structured tools with the professional judgment of practitioners.
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. The formulation relies on the synthesis of information and risk judgement of the practitioner. 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
North East - Newcastle & North Tyneside 2 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/NE/0095
Date of REC Opinion
18 Jul 2023
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion