The MATS-1 Risk Assessment Scale: Summary of Methodological Concerns and an Empirical Validation
Published online on April 23, 2014
Abstract
Recently, Wollert and colleagues proposed that sex offender recidivism estimates should be stratified by age and they developed an age-stratified scale called the MATS-1 (Multisample Age-Stratified Table of Sexual Recidivism). The purpose of this article is to highlight concerns with the development of the MATS-1 and to validate the scale using 3,510 sex offenders from 14 unique samples. Concerns with the scale’s development fall into three categories: approximations leading to considerable loss of precision, absence of appropriate statistical tests, and the use of inappropriate statistical techniques. The predictive accuracy of the MATS-1 (Area Under the Curve [AUC] = .663) was significantly lower than Static-99R (AUC = .708). The MATS-1 also significantly underestimated recidivism for some offenders. Both the relative and absolute predictive properties of the MATS-1 were not stable across samples. We conclude that the MATS-1 is not appropriate to use for applied risk assessment. Proposals are made for alternate ways to develop risk scales using the age-stratification method.