Reading of this week is a general introduction about different assessment tools used for prediction of adolescents’ possibilities in committing crime. The function of adolescent risk assessments is mainly used for court decision and intervention planning. Actuarial approach (AP) and structured professional judgement approach (SPJ) are the major forms for adolescent risk assessment, and SPJ form is more likely to be used. Viljoen, Grey, and Barone's (in press) article
First, the results of adolescent risk assessments can be problematic because of the involvement of subjective judgments from assessors. As major forms of assessments, both actuarial and SPJ allow experts to make their subjective judgements. For instance, as a major form of AP, YLS/CMI 2.0 allowed the assessors to “change their original risk rating, this is called ‘professional override option’ ” (Viljoen et al. in press, P. 13). Similarly, SPJ approach allows experts to …show more content…
According to this paper, all adolescent risk assessments have been revised elaborately in the last few decades. Consequently, most assessments have “better validity, and more defensible in legal setting” (Viljoen et al. in press, P. 27). In other words, results form these assessments seems more accurate and authoritative. This statement reminded me the case of criticism about the DSM-5 in my psychology history class. Francis (2014) argued that the DSM-5 will make everyone relatively abnormal because of its elaborate description about disorders. Back to the reading of this week, risk assessments become more defensible because their revised edition can always find evidence to justify someone is relatively violent. Risk assessments are necessary used for special cases, but it does not mean that assessors can be assertive to give the judgment of the risk possibility to all