Assessing predictions of violence: being accurate about accuracy.

Commentary: assessing the risk of violence--are "accurate" predictions useful?

The Prediction of Violence; Detection of Dangerousness

Contemporary evidence on the correlates of violence and the accuracy of predictions of violent outcomes is derived from a large body of research dating from approximately 1990. Substance abuse and several demographic variables have clearly been demonstrated to be significant risk factors for violence. The data on the link of various specific symptoms of psychiatric disorders to violence are inc...

Building mental health professionals' decisional models into tests of predictive validity: the accuracy of contextualized predictions of violence.

To safely manage potentially violent patients in the community, mental health professionals (MHPs) must assess when and under what conditions a patient may be involved in a violent act. This study applies a more ecologically sensitive approach than past research by building the conditions that MHPs believe make patient violence more likely into tests of their predictive validity. In specific, t...

ACADEMIA AND CLINIC Assessing the Generalizability of Prognostic Information

Physicians are often asked to make prognostic assessments but often worry that their assessments will prove inaccurate. Prognostic systems were developed to enhance the accuracy of such assessments. This paper describes an approach for evaluating prognostic systems based on the accuracy (calibration and discrimination) and generalizability (reproducibility and transportability) of the system’s ...

Current Directions in Violence Risk Assessment

Over recent years, a variety of instruments that improve clinicians’ ability to forecast the likelihood that an individual will behave violently have been published. Increasingly, these instruments are being applied in response to laws that require specialized risk assessments. In this article, we present a framework that goes beyond the ‘‘clinical’’ and ‘‘actuarial’’ dichotomy to describe a co...