A critical appraisal of violent incident measures

Abstract

Instrumentation for the recording of violent incidents on psychiatric wards for the purposes of research remain rudimentary and underdeveloped. This paper provides a critical review of the currently available research tools: the Overt Aggression Scale, the Modified Overt Aggression Scale, the Staff Observation Aggression Scale, the Violence Scale, the Retrospective Overt Aggression Scale, the Aggressive Incident Record Form and the use of video camera surveillance. All have potentially fatal handicaps which have not been identified in previous reviews, the most serious of which is the conflation of severity of a violent incident with the outcome in terms of injury. In order to make research progress it is necessary to sharpen our research instrumentation by the separate study of different forms of aggression, and by using an objective, behavioural definition of assault severity.