NCJ Number
217451
Journal
Legal and Criminological Psychology Volume: 12 Issue: 1 Dated: February 2007 Pages: 55-68
Date Published
February 2007
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This study tested an assessment questionnaire for sex offenders with intellectual disabilities (ID) that was designed to distinguish between offender cognitions (attitudes, values, thoughts, and beliefs) associated with rape, voyeurism, exhibitionism, dating abuse, stalking, homosexual assault, and offenses against children.
Abstract
All of the seven scales of the instrument successfully distinguished between the cognitions associated with each deviant sexual behavior. Of the seven scales, five achieve an internal consistency coefficient of 0.8 or greater against an acceptable standard of at least 0.4. These findings held even when the control subjects (subjects with no intellectual disabilities and no deviant sexual behavior) were eliminated because their scores were so low. The robust statistical properties of this instrument make it suitable for clinical and research purposes. Four participant groups were used in this study: sex offenders with ID (n=41), nonsexual offenders with ID (n=34), nonoffenders with ID (n=30), and non-ID controls with no sexual offenses (n=31). All subjects were men. All subjects completed the questionnaire, and each item was subjected to three tests of reliability. Retained items were required to achieve an item-to-total correlation of at least 0.4. 2 tables and 39 references