The purpose of the proposed study is to develop a violence proneness index which will provide a measure of the probability of future violence for persons referred to mental health facilities as a result of a violent or threatened violent act. Index items will be derived from interviews with 210 self, family, or police referred and 30 court referred (involuntary) patients; data will be collected on intake to the Western Missouri Mental Health Center. Three follow-up interviews will then be conducted at 3-month intervals. Arrests and mental health admissions for violence will be monitored for 12 months to provide criterion outcome data. Based on the existing literature on prediction of violence and the investigator's preliminary studies, it is hypothesized that items contributing the highest predictive scores can be derived from the following interview data sets: (a) a demographic data, (b) past criminal justice and mental health system contacts, (c) life events data, (d) items assessing the structure, quality and salience of the subject's family, peer and work environments, (e) psychiatric diagnosis, (f) IQ, (g) alcohol and drug use, and (h) access to a weapon. Discriminant function analyses of these person and environment measures will then be performed to obtain coefficients for predictive items and these items will form the basis of a violence prediction instrument. A cross-validation sample of 250 Ss from Western Missouri Mental Health Center and 250 Ss from Rainbow Mental Health Center for which arrests and admissions will be monitored for 6 months will provide predictive probabilities. The final product will be a violence proneness scale which can be used in mental health settings as a basis for decision making with respect to treatment, release and follow-up plans. In addition, data analyses will provide comparisons of the predictive powers across different prediction time intervals.
| Klassen, D; O'Connor, W A (1988) Crime, inpatient admissions, and violence among male mental patients. Int J Law Psychiatry 11:305-12 |
