Developing a Family Risk Assessment Tool in Adolescent Offenders: An Exploratory Study
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Developing a Family Risk Assessment Tool in Adolescent Offenders: An Exploratory Study Diamantino Jose´ Figueiredo dos Santos1,2,4 • Isabel Maria Marques Alberto3
Published online: 24 June 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract The quality of family relations it is a relevant risk or protective factor in the adolescent criminal involvement, being the interplay between family and adolescent individual features, fundamental issues in the understanding of the adolescent risk and strengths assessment. This study aims to contribute to the validation of the Structured Interview of Family Assessment Risk (SIFAR) tool for the adolescent offenders’ family, based in nine family living items as risk factors and four protective factors. In an exploratory design, the structural consistency of SIFAR was analyzed using Cronbach’s alpha, mean inter-item correlation and exploratory factor analysis over risk items, because of the protective items dichotomous scale. The participants were a sample of 130 male adolescent delinquents detained in Portuguese facilities of the Directorate-general of Social Rehabilitation and Imprisonment, and their parents, paired analyzed. The SIFAR presents a structured professional judgment design for adolescent offender’s family protective and risk assessment. A reliability value of .75 was obtained for the risk items education, employment, housing/transport, legal problems, social dissonance, poverty, social net, social security and parenting, and an .79 was registered to the protective items family involvement, high discipline, low & Diamantino Jose´ Figueiredo dos Santos [email protected] 1
Educational Center of Olivais, DGRSP, Coimbra, Portugal
2
Family Psychology and Family Intervention, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
3
Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
4
Urbanizac¸a˜o Ar e Sol, lote 24, 1.°C, 3020-205 Coimbra, Portugal
physical punishment and low parental stress. The risk items revealed a two-factor structure (social-economics and social conformity factors) explaining 48.15 % of the total variance. Results show the potential usefulness of SIFAR in the assessment the family protective and risk factors of adolescent offenders, presenting adequate structural reliability and construct validity. However further investigation it is necessary to the validation process of this tool. Keywords Delinquency Risk assessment Family Adolescence
Introduction Criminal behavior is a multi-dimensional phenomenon that requires integrated assessment, using multiple sources of information with empirically validated measures and avoiding the constraints of clinical judgment (Andrews and Bonta 2010; Fulero and Wrightsman 2009; Heilbrun et al. 2009; Ruiter and Nicholls 2011). One strategy for assessing criminal behavior is an assessment of offender risk. This field of forensic work highlights the need to integrate developmental/individual and contextual issues, risk assessment, risk management and responsivenes
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