Essay on How do actuarial methods and clinical methods affect probation officers in the workplace?

One of psychology’s main problems is that of efficacy in method of prediction. Concerning this issue, much controversy and some research comprising actuarial versus clinical approaches have come to the front. The purpose of this research paper is to investigate the relative efficiency of these two approaches in predicting repeating child abuses. This paper aims to investigate different methods to the estimation of risk in terms of the probable contributions of every set of instruments and/or approaches to decision-making in child welfare. Many recent investigations have explored the issues associated with the execution of risk assessment systems and have compared several risk assessment instruments utilized in child defense services. This paper does not replicate these investigations. It begins with looking at the rationale for the usage of risk estimation instruments in terms of their purpose and as a way of managing problems in decision-making in a child protection context. Then an overview of risk estimation approaches is provided in terms of two models – actuarial and clinical methods.

Thesis: It is vital for probation officers to guarantee that information about families was attained from various resources by actuarial and clinical methods, therefore increasing the accuracy of the decision-making process.

Rationale for the Use of Risk Assessment Instruments

Assessment in child protection commonly comprises 2 separate processes: assessing the degree of risk of future assault and a contextual estimation of a kid and family functioning to inform casework decisions and service planning. Nonetheless, these processes are also related. Effectual risk estimation is dependent on probation officers gaining a holistic, ecological and empirically based assessment of the family. This comprises an acknowledgement of the circumstances that affected the family and brought it to the child protection system.

The troubles involved in making clinical decisions concerning the risk of potential injury in some cases have led to the evolvement of formal risk assessment measures to overcome the shortfalls of unassisted clinical judgments. Cicchinelli asserts among the most salient deficiencies which encouraged the evolvement of risk assessment models were:

• the absence of a rational foundation for making decisions concerning the future of abused children
• subjective and contradictory decision-making across different cases
• ineffective intervention variants and unproductive resource distribution
• the absence of agency accountability
• inadequate probation officers’ training and on-the-job support (Cicchinelli, 3-8).

Risk Assessment in Child Welfare

Child protection practice comprises the decision making concerning the protection and welfare of little children and adolescents. These decisions count assessing the possible degree of risk of violence and/or abandon a child is exposed to in their environment, the services which can possibly lessen this risk and the point at which it is necessary for a kid to be taken away from the care of his or her own family. The main trouble in child defense services is the identification of efficient instruments and approaches which help managers and organizations to guarantee that these decisions are based on the present state of information and research not only surrounding child protection practice, but of decision-making processes. A certain anxiety is the recognition of usual human mistakes in decision-making processes and ways that these may be avoided, in particular as these mistakes in a child defense context may prove to be fatal.

Risk assessment is the main ingredient of child protection practice, and informs decisions at all levels of child protection service delivery. Consequently, there has been a substantial interest in the use of risk assessment technology in the child protection practice from the outset. Also, there has been a heated discussion concerning the most productive approaches for assessing risks and the essence of the risk that has to be assessed. Lately, this discussion has been escalated into what has been depicted by scholars as the “risk assessment wars” (Baumann, Law, Sheets, Reid, Graham, 465-490). Significantly, this “war” concerns the question -what are the best approaches to assess and “predict” violence in child welfare cases? Different iterations of the “war” have debated the relative qualities of clinical or actuarial models for assessing risk. For the child protection services, the discussion may seem to be about opting the “most appropriate” approach of assessing risk, meaning the selection of this “most appropriate” model or tool will robotically advance the child protection decision-making.

For child protection services, this discussion is not an academic debate. It’s an every day concern for child welfare practitioners who are faced with the constant reality of decision-making over the extent to which they should intervene in the lives of families to defend the welfare of kids where there may be anxieties for their safety. Nevertheless, the most recent discussion on risk assessment has started to move away from a search for the final tool to the recognition that whilst some instruments more precisely categorize risk, this does not rule out the requirement for other approaches (consensus and clinical judgment) in working out what services will assist to improve risk as well as assist in engaging the family with these services. This debate accepts that there will constantly be some inexactness concerning risk assessment instruments.

Methods of Assessing Risk

Though there are many diverse approaches of assessment, they all tend to fall into 2 main groups: clinical and actuarial. Clinical forecast requires from the probation officers the observation of a felon by a psychiatrists or a psychologist; doctors review risk taking into consideration professional training, theoretical facts and experience with other felons. Actuarial approach comprises forecasting a criminal’s behavior on the foundation of how other criminals have acted under the same circumstances… or a person’s resemblance to members of aggressive groups. Actuarial forecast comprises the practice of statistical models and risk factor tools. A widely utilized method in the literature to categories risk estimation approaches is to differentiate between models on the foundation of how the certain tool was evolved.

Clinical Risk Assessment

A clinical variant of estimation usually comprises a judgment by a psychological health doctor concerning the risk a human being poses. A doctor, often a psychologist or psychiatrist, observes and talks to the individual. The doctor can utilize rating schemes and checklists created by other psychiatrists or psychologists. Any accessible data about the felon’s personality and behavior and all elements of the child abuse are considered. The risk factors utilized in a clinical estimation are dissimilar for every human being assessed and may alter over time. They comprise psychological disabilities, personal history, attitudes, behavior, and social skills. These personal features provide the professional with a picture of the person, and a decision about the potential injury he or she may have. It should be also mentioned that The Supreme Courts recognizes the clinical approach as a constitutionally suitable measure for estimating risk.

Although clinical risk assessment had gained legal appreciation, the capability to precisely differentiate felons who will repeat the crime from those who will not, utilizing clinical approach, is doubtful. When evaluating a person, doctors usually fail to pay attention to the risk factors, for instance, age, gender or criminal history. Belfrage performed in the examination of psychiatrists to make a decision to what degree some factors (the crime committed, diagnosis, age or prior offences) influenced felon’s assessments. It was discovered that only the sort of crime committed separated criminals classified as “high-risk” from those who were measured “low-risk” (Belfrage, Fransson, Strand, 167-175).

Needless to mention that other researches have demonstrated when given a lot of data, non-specialists making clinical forecasts prove to be as precise as clinicians. Additionally, studies show that doctors usually come to various conclusions after estimating the same person. Maybe dissimilarities in clinical points of view may be due to a lack of accuracy in a clinician training. One way or another, these findings put into a question the essence of clinical “expertise” in dangerousness forecast, saying the estimation process is subjective, and the fate of a criminal depends on who conducts the evaluation.

Actuarial Risk Assessment

When a criminal is assessed utilizing an actuarial method, his particular features are inventoried and his risk is determined by the level to which he possesses various risk features associated with recidivism. The data considered in the estimation process usually comprises the felon’s education degree, employment position and mental disabilities in addition to the criminal history. This data will aid in estimating the risk posed by felons being considered for discharge. For instance, if some features frequent to hard-core criminals are discovered in a potentially released on bail person, then that individual is estimated more attentively than a felon who does not have this feature. Likewise, people who have feature characteristics frequent to non-recidivists will be measured of a lower risk. Actuarial assessments have the benefit of providing criminals with more definite date on their position, making the system seem less subjective.”

Actuarial risk assessment concentrates mainly on unchangeable features which influence recidivism. Some researches have discovered the unchangeable risk factor with the most powerful impact on general recidivism is prior contact with the criminal justice or psychological health systems. Violent recidivism is best forecasted by prior crimes, psychological disabilities, and a history of abuse. For sex criminals, recidivism is more frequent among people who have previous sexual offences, one and more casualties, casualties who are not family members, and who have shown a sexual fondness of very young kid.

Sex criminals who repeat their crimes are usually young, of a minority race and are single. Unchangeable features are comparatively easy to code, as no rater estimation is needed, and they are extensively used in actuarial risk assessment instruments. Nevertheless, an inventory of unchangeable variables alone does not give an apparent picture of risk since these features will never alter, yet the possibility of the criminal recidivating may alter. Felons are provided with treatment in specific facilities to lessen the probability of future child abuses; if a criminal’s risk for re-offending is reduced with the help of treatment, unchangeable factor inventory will not appraise this modification in risk.

Dynamic factors help foresee recidivism as well as static features. They are also measured by some actuarial risk assessment instruments. It is knowledge of dynamic features that is important to estimate alterations in an offender’s risk level. Through involvement in the rehabilitative program, a felon can become less violent, but probation officers would not be capable to evaluate this alteration unless they assessed the felon’s risk based on changeable features. Dynamic traits associated with general recidivism comprise harmful personality, social accomplishment, inner conflict and substance abuse. With the respect to sex criminals, a research demonstrated an antisocial lifestyle, poor social support and a broadminded approach toward a sexual physical attack were the features which had the strongest tie with sex offence recidivism.

There are also many actuarial scales that may be utilized to evaluate risk. Some examples are the Statistical Information on Recidivism scale, Violence Risk Appraisal Guide and so on. Actuarial instruments are developed by employing empirical research procedures to recognize the set of risk factors with a strong statistical relationship to the behavioral result of interest to the prognostic enterprise. These are combined to form an estimation instrument that optimally classifies families or people according to the “risk” they will exhibit the behavior. Actuarial instrument items comprised are empirically identified by studying child protection cases and abuse results in a certain geographical area. Consequently, caution has to be employed in utilizing approaches in different jurisdictions without suitable validation studies.

One of the strongest arguments for the usage of the actuarial approach in criminal law derives from the assumptions of rational action theory, and rests on both a deterrence and efficiency rationale: assuming potential criminals respond rationally to the likelihood of being punished, then targeting law enforcement on people of a higher-offending group will decrease the offending rates of higher-offending group members since it will increase their cost of abnormal behavior, and increase the efficiency of the police in detecting crime and apprehending criminals, or increase the efficacy of the sentencing authorities in meeting out punishment and deterring future offending (Bernard, 25).

Sadly, neither the actuarial nor clinical approach of risk forecast has proven mainly precise, but each method has its supporters asserting one method is better than the other one. Several researches have demonstrated actuarial judgments to be far better than some clinical estimation. However, researches warn the indicators on which actuarial assessments are concentrated have not been adequately identified. Some scholars found actuarial assessments to be far more efficient, but still regard the accurateness of actuarial method to be really modest.

Risk Assessment Discussion

Risk assessment in dangerous criminal proceedings differs from risk assessment made by probation officers. As a general rule, actuarial instruments are utilized to decide risk degree in imprisoned criminals; in dangerous criminal proceedings, clinical forecasts are presented to the court. Furthermore, the appraisal of risk in a dangerous criminal hearing has a huge influence on the future of the individual as he could experience custody for up to life. Risk assessment may influence the time the human being spends behind bars, but once the felon has finished serving his term, he has to be immediately released. The parole system considers both approaches in the release decision making. Evaluations are made by checking things like the criminal’s behavior history, instant circumstances, outlook on life and community support.

Assessments may yield statistically vital success rates, but they are not capable to give precise forecasts in a considerable part of cases. According to some scholars, the prognostic exactness of risk assessments (actuarial and clinical) is a little better than mere chance. False positives and negatives are a great concern in the assessment of risk. Dangerous people may be released and influence the duties of probation officers. Moreover, they can hurt children again.

Usually, even probation officers are skeptical of forecasts of future events, but the doubt and fright that accompany the release of potentially dangerous human beings leads to a dependence on risk assessments to assist ease concerns. It should be mentioned that risk assessments merely provide a probability of recidivism for each criminal. It is the accountability of probation officers to make a decision whether a human being’s freedom should be denied based on the level of risk for recidivism. Low-risk criminals who obtain freedom may commit a crime again as well. This raises a very complex question: at what point does a human being becomes so dangerous that his right to freedom is prevailed by people’s right to defense from a potentially hazardous person?

Combining the matters associated with assessment, prejudice may enter the process. Though doctors and probation officers may strive to remain objective and to keep prejudice from influencing their estimations, it is widely recognized that any task accepted by a human being will be influenced by his or her viewpoint. For instance, some investigations demonstrated that “gender norms guide the estimation process,” violence is attributed to men more usually than women, even though the general rates of violence were equal for males and females. It has also been discovered that doctors’ and probation officers’ decisions and treatments are influenced by the appearance of the felon.

In spite of the above mentioned problems, risk assessments may be enhanced. Actuarial forecast is commonly regarded as the more precise approach of the assessment. In virtually each decision-making situation for which the question has been researched, it has been discovered that statistically developed forecast devices outperform human judgments. There are many grounds for the advantage of statistical forecasts, ranging from human mistake and absence of attention to base rates of behavior to unsuitable weighting of features, comprising assigning weight to features with no prognostic value.

At the same time, on their own, the clinical and actuarial approaches are both average in their prognostic capability. Therefore, most scholars utilize a combination of statistical and clinical methods. Clinical testing (suitable legal, academic and clinical training, information about the risk literature), together with some type of statistical forecast, provides the greatest exactness of forecast at the present time.

Likewise, a clinical estimation may be enhanced by a follow up actuarial appraisal of the criminal. Particularly, when the clinical estimation is made, the criminal could be compared to the conduct or backgrounds associated with high risk criminals. Alternatively, clinical data may be utilized to advance actuarial assessments. Secondary estimations may be helpful in the assessment of borderline cases. Therefore, there is a general agreement among assessment professionals that an amplified number of features considered by clinical and actuarial methods lead to more precise assessments. This leads people to question the restricted usage of clinical estimation in dangerous criminal proceedings and the dependence on actuarial method in risk assessment during parole decision making. By combining the prognostic power of clinical and actuarial approaches, a more precise determination of risk may be made in sentencing or in the correctional risk management and release planning.

One more suggestion that has been made by many researchers is the requirement to consider static and dynamic factors when forecasting risk. By looking only at the static factors, the supposition that the human being can’t and won’t alter the behavior is absolutely made. In addition, risk forecast may be enhanced by permanent research and evolvement of new actuarial instruments that may show a lower degree of false positives and negatives than current instruments. To achieve a higher level of accuracy, it may be necessary to evolve instruments to assess certain groups of individuals for specific sorts of risk. Research has demonstrated the majority of actuarial instruments are better at forecasting risk for certain types of criminals than for others.

Since risk assessments are not ideal, false negatives and positives are inescapable. It is clear that false negatives may be lessened by imprisoning all felons who demonstrate any dangerous characteristics; nevertheless, this would effect in very high numbers of false positives. Alternatively, trying to lessen the quantity of false positives will result in more false negatives. Mistake is inbuilt in the process since there is no way of knowing for sure how a felon will behave when released.

There is one matter at the core of the risk assessment discussion that is far more complex than merely the accurateness of assessments. Particularly, this matter is how to balance the standard of proportionality with children’s right to be protected from hazardous human beings. It has been offered that the mismatched interests of individual freedom and the safety of people are most suitably solved in the judicial or legislative sphere. Certainly, the court considers a felon’s risk. But after the felon has been sent to custody, it’s the accountability of probation officers to weigh the criminal’s rights against rights of children.

Purpose of risk assessment instruments in child welfare

The main aim of utilizing risk assessment tools in child welfare is to establish the severity of abuse to intervene and defend children from future injury. Other grounds for their usage comprise: working over the notion of risk, thus providing a systematic and reliable approach to the estimation of risk; substantiating a case; determining the severity of the violence and prioritizing cases; giving a way to structure documentation throughout the history of a case; determining the sort of services needed and critical points in the case.

Comparison of Approaches

There are many strong researches demonstrating that actuarial methods are better than clinical judgment, predominantly concerning the classification of families at risk for child mistreatment. For instance, some scientists report on a meta-analysis of 136 studies contrasting clinical with statistical forecasting across a range of health and behavioral settings. Practically 95% of the researches discovered actuarial approaches to be equal to or superior to clinical judgment. Even a small set of actuarial features generally provides far better forecast in comparison to the clinical features. At the same time, actuarial methods are far from perfect. This approach has considerably less accuracy in deciding which moderate risk families are most likely to become of high risk, or which families are at risk for tragic results such as child death. There is also acknowledgment that there has been little work on whether the factors which forecast child abuse are the same as those forecasting repeatable abuse.

There are many limitations to the actuarial method:

• actuarial method tends to concentrate assessment on a limited quantity of factors, therefore neglecting potentially critical case-specific, characteristic features;
• there is a trend to concentrate on comparatively static features that are unchallengeable, thus leading to passive forecasts;
• actuarial method may exclude critical risk features on the basis they have not been proven empirically, even though they may be quite logical
• actuarial method tend to be optimized to forecast the certain result, over a certain period of time in a specific populace, leading to non-optimal decisions when used in different circumstances.

The majority of studies concerning risk assessment acknowledges, the usage of any sort of actuarial risk assessment tool require nice clinical skills. A caseworker may sense things that an actuarial tool would neglect or could not utilize… Many features of human beings merely can’t be measured empirically and actuarial approach can’t simply account for a rare event. Thus, clinical judgment may never be removed from any risk estimation process. Many scholars in child welfare assert tools for risk and safety assessment should be recognized as decision aids to improve or develop upon clinical judgment rather than as an opposing method.

Though actuarial approach is more likely to give precise data, there are still many difficulties associated with its usage. It is vital that risk assessment instruments are risk arrangement instruments rather than abuse prediction instruments. It is important to note that actuarial assessment is far more helpful in labeling human beings than it is in understanding and solving their problems. They are much better at distinguishing between groups than human beings. Therefore, instead of forecasting what will happen, the classification of a greater or lesser degree of risk merely tells probation officers which cases are more likely to be of high-risk. Consequently, the professional judgment of probation officers is still central.

Problems with Decision-making in Child Protection Assessment

An important issue in child protection risk estimation is the contradictions in decision-making processes of child protection service workers and probation officers if they have to work together. In a study on mistakes of reasoning in child protection work, Munro asserts total accurateness is an idealistic expectation. Nevertheless, the results from this study examining 45 child abuse inquiry reports pointed out that “in some cases, it turned out that on the proof available, professionals drew the wrong conclusions and that the following distress could have been avoided” (Munro, 745-746).

Conclusion

The literature surrounding risk assessment attempted to be polarized into a discussion on the relative qualities of actuarial and clinical approaches to risk assessment. Whatever the approach adopted, it was noted risk estimation is disadvantaged by:

• troubles with definitions of harm and risk;
• troubles with implementation;
• level of mistake;
• absence of empirical researches into the actuarial tools accessible.

Simultaneously, the literature drew on actuarial investigations (such as works of Belfrage, Munro and other famous scientists) shows the ability of actuarial method to develop consistency and answerability in decision making across child protective services. Concern over clinical method concentrates on human data processing mistakes, especially on the thought that personal judgment is usually influenced by the contextual factors. These factors are: the representativeness of the case, the availability or brilliance of the data and the supposed relevance of the accessible data to the future decision.

Nevertheless, actuarial assessment tools will not necessarily help in forecasting which children within the populace known to child protective services are at risk of severe harm or death. The uncommonness of such events poses challenges for actuarial tools and it has been asserted that, rather than to attempt to identify such cases, efforts are better directed towards anticipation initiatives for all families since such strategies are more likely to help these families than the more targeted initiatives.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative efficiency of clinical and actuarial approaches in predicting repeating child abuses. The results of this investigation can’t claim superiority for one approach over the other. Though the evidence to date, favors the actuarial, it would be premature, on the basis of such evidence, to claim even equality of the two methods at this time. The research paper points up the need for further investigation with the more severely controlled results.

However, on the basis of this paper, the actuarial approach (though less time consuming) proves to be as efficient as the clinical approach in predicting repeating child abuses. Many scientists criticize the “either/or” discussion between actuarial and clinical approaches, asserting the different methods to risk assessment were complementary rather than mutually exclusive. There is a consensus in the literature that, whatever the approach accepted, its effectiveness is dependent on skilled and well-trained staff.

The effective and dependable estimation and management of criminals are pressing issues. Pedophilia and any other type of child abuse attract the increasing public and media attention. Under the circumstances it is vital that police personnel and probation officers are able to perform their duties to recognize, assess and register felons, and where appropriate, contribute to the effectual estimation of hazardous individuals. Combined actuarial and clinical approaches may contribute to valuable risk assessment. In terms of risk management, there is growing data on useful programs and case management for criminals. Probation officers should be familiar with all these programs since they play a key role in the effectual execution of risk management strategies. Risk assessment is an imperfect process and always will be – any possible enhancements will never make risk assessment an extremely accurate endeavor. But strong efforts should be made to lessen the growing prison populace in the country.