Risk-Appraisal Versus Self-Report in the Prediction of Criminal Justice Outcomes

Twenty-seven individual pairs of effect sizes from 22 prospective studies employing one or more of the following five risk-appraisal procedures: Historical-Clinical-Risk Scales (HCR–20), Lifestyle Criminality Screening Form (LCSF), Level of Service-Inventory (LSI), Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), Violence Risk Appraisal Guide (VRAG), and one or more self-report measures were subjected to meta-analysis. Although risk-appraisal procedures displayed an advantage over self-report measures in recidivism prediction, the two methods produced comparable results when the meta-analysis was restricted to investigations using content-relevant self-report predictors. Incremental validity analysis of 72 risk-appraisal/self-report contrasts revealed that bothsets of measures accounted for criminal justice outcomes beyond the variance attributable to the alternate method.