Adapting measures of social climate for use with individuals with intellectual developmental disability in forensic settings

ABSTRACT

The social climate of forensic settings is thought to impact on a number of important clinical and organisational outcomes and is, therefore, an important construct in relation to the successful functioning of forensic units. A variety of self-report questionnaires have been developed to objectively measure the social climate of forensic settings (e.g. the Correctional Institutions Environment Scale and the Essen Climate Evaluation Schema), however these questionnaires have not been validated for individuals with intellectual developmental disabilities (IDD). Given the prevalence of IDD in prison and forensic psychiatric settings and the potential impact of such cognitive deficits on the ability to complete a range of self-report questionnaires, it is important to consider the potential reliability and validity of existing social climate measures in IDD populations. This article will, therefore: (1) examine the cognitive, linguistic and response format difficulties that may arise when administering self-report measures of social climate in IDD populations; (2) consider potential adaptations to existing measures of social climate that might make them more suitable for use with IDD populations; and (3) identify important directions for future research in the area.

KEYWORDS:

• Social climate
• intellectual disability
• developmental disability
• forensic psychiatric hospital
• prison

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Verity Chester http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0710-6177

Notes

1 The latest Learning Disability Census revealed that there were 3000 individuals with IDD in specialist inpatient units in England (Health and Social Care Information Centre, 2015). The number of individuals with IDD in prison remains unknown. However, Rack (2005) estimated that 20% of the prison population has a hidden disability and Mottram (2007) estimated that 32% of the prison population had an IQ < 80.

2 Of note is that the authors did not specify how they adapted the WAS for this study.

3 Rasch Analysis is a unique approach of mathematical modelling based upon a latent trait and accomplishes stochastic (probabilistic) conjoint additivity (conjoint means measurement of persons and items on the same scale and additivity is the equal-interval property of the scale).