Rater experience and the predictive validity of Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version scores

Abstract

We compared the predictive validity of Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) scores assigned by a licensed clinician to scores assigned by a graduate student across a sample of 82 juvenile offenders. Although both raters completed in-depth training and practice scoring cases, the graduate student had no prior clinical experience. The raters showed a high level of agreement in their scoring for 11 reliability check cases (intraclass correlation coefficient, ICC_A,1 = .90 for PCL:YV Total score), but the scores assigned by the licensed clinician were better predictors of post-release recidivism (area under the curve, AUC = .77) than those assigned by the graduate student (AUC = .45). There was more variability in the scores assigned by the licensed clinician than those assigned by the graduate student, suggesting that more experienced clinicians’ willingness to assign both high and low scores may help explain rater differences in predictive validity.

Key words:

• Clinical experience
• Psychopathy Checklist
• Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version
• risk assessment

Author note

Hyemin Jeon & Marcus T. Boccaccini, Department of Psychology, Sam Houston State University; Eunkyung Jo, College of Criminal Justice, Dongguk University, Republic of Korea; Hyejin Jang, Department of Psychology, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Republic of Korea. Daniel C. Murrie, Institute of Law, Psychiatry, & Public Policy, University of Virginia.

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Hyemin Jeon has declared no conflicts of interest

Marcus T. Boccaccini has declared no conflicts of interest

Eunkyung Jo is a co-author of the translated, Korean-language version of the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised, a version of which (Youth Version) is the focus of this study

Hyejin Jang declared no conflicts of interest

Daniel C. Murrie declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were approved by the Chucheon Juvenile Probation Department (Gwangwon-do, South Korea) and were in accordance with the ethical standards of the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study

Notes

1 Results from other logistic regression models examining violent and non-violent recidivism are available from the second author.