Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Access Criminology and Criminal Justice journals now

CiteULike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references - click here to get started.

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Dempster, R. J.
Right arrow Articles by Hart, S. D.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Dempster, R. J.
Right arrow Articles by Hart, S. D.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

The Relative Utility of Fixed and Variable Risk Factors in Discriminating Sexual Recidivists and Nonrecidivists

Rebecca J. Dempster

Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

Stephen D. Hart

Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada

This study compared the relative utility of fixed and variable risk factors in discriminating between recidivist and nonrecidivist sexual offenders. Subjects were 95 adult male offenders released from the Canadian federal correctional system between 1988 and 1992. Risk factors from the Sexual Violence Risk-20 (SVR-20; D. P. Boer, S. D. Hart, P. R. Kropp, & C. D. Webster, 1997) were coded from prerelease institutional records; sexual and nonsexual violent recidivism was coded from postrelease police and correctional records. SVR-20 risk factors were categorized as fixed (static) or variable (dynamic) markers according to the criteria of H. C. Kraemer et al. (1997); the fixed risk markers were further divided into offense history and psychosocial factors. Hierarchical Cox regression survival analyses were conducted to compare the relative contribution of fixed offense history, fixed psychosocial, and variable psychosocial risk markers in accounting for any violent recidivism and sexually violent recidivism. Analyses indicated that fixed psychosocial factors added little to the models comprised fixed offense history factors alone. There was some evidence that variable psychosocial factors had incremental validity when added to predictions made on the basis of fixed factors, particularly in the prediction of sexual violence. The individual factors that were included in the final models are consistent with previous findings, and support the use of sexual deviance and antisocial lifestyle variables in the prediction of recidivism among sexual offenders.

Key Words: recidivism • fixed risk factors • variable risk factors • prediction.

Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, Vol. 14, No. 2, 121-138 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/107906320201400204
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?