Citation

Assink M, van der Put CE, Stams GJ. Int. J. Offender Ther. Comp. Criminol. 2014; 60(7): 847-864.

Affiliation

University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0306624X14558204

PMID

25395478

Abstract

For prevention purposes, it is important that police officers can estimate the risk for delinquency among juveniles who were involved in a criminal offense, but not in the role of a suspect. In the present study, the Youth Actuarial Risk Assessment Tool for First-Time Offending (Y-ARAT-FO) was developed based solely on police records with the aim to enable Dutch police officers to predict the risk for first-time offending. For the construction of this initial screening instrument, an Exhaustive Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (Exhaustive CHAID) analysis was performed on a data set that was retrieved from the Dutch police system. The Y-ARAT-FO was developed on a sample of 1,368 juveniles and validated on a different sample of 886 juveniles showing moderate predictive accuracy in the validation sample (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC] =.728). The predictive accuracy of the Y-ARAT-FO was considered sufficient to justify its use as an initial screening instrument by the Dutch police.

Language: en