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The Development and Validation of an Actuarial Risk Assessment Tool for the Prediction of First-Time Offending

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International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology

Published online on

Abstract

For prevention purposes, it is important that police officers can estimate the risk for delinquency among juveniles who were involved in a criminal offense, but not in the role of a suspect. In the present study, the Youth Actuarial Risk Assessment Tool for First-Time Offending (Y-ARAT-FO) was developed based solely on police records with the aim to enable Dutch police officers to predict the risk for first-time offending. For the construction of this initial screening instrument, an Exhaustive Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (Exhaustive CHAID) analysis was performed on a data set that was retrieved from the Dutch police system. The Y-ARAT-FO was developed on a sample of 1,368 juveniles and validated on a different sample of 886 juveniles showing moderate predictive accuracy in the validation sample (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUC] = .728). The predictive accuracy of the Y-ARAT-FO was considered sufficient to justify its use as an initial screening instrument by the Dutch police.