Identification of Juveniles at Risk for Future Serious Delinquency Using Reynolds Adolescent Adjustment Screening Inventory

• In Event: Screening and Intervention for Early Childhood Prevention

Abstract

The identification of juveniles at risk suited for specific prevention of violence or serious delinquency is still a problem and depends on the availability of reliable diagnostic instruments applicable by teachers or social workers at school.
The Reynolds Adolescent Adjustment Screening Inventory (RAASI) is a self-report measure of emotional and behavioral problems including thirty-two items rated by the juvenile on a scale of 0 (never or almost never) to 2 (nearly all the time).
The main purpose of our study was to test whether the RAASI can be used as parsimonious instrument to differentiate between groups of non offender, minor offender, and serious offenders, previously defined by Latent Class Analyses based on self reported delinquency.
At first we used a sample of about 3000 7th and 9th graders to identify items with high discriminant power, using ROC-analysis of the items. Seven Items were identified and combined to a subscale with alpha=.80. Using this subscale we achieved a sensitivity of 80% for the correct classification of violent offender and of 88% for serious offender (false positive rate: 17%). These results were replicated on another sample of 3000 juveniles with same age from another city.

Authors

• Katrin Brettfeld, University of Hamburg

• Peter Gerhard Wetzels, University of Hamburg