Improving the Evaluation of Adult Mental Disorders in the Criminal Justice System With Computerized Adaptive Testing
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: OBJECTIVE: The authors sought to develop and validate a suite of dimensional measures of psychiatric syndromes for use in a criminal justice population. METHODS: The previously validated Computerized Adaptive Test-Mental Health (CAT-MH) was administered to a sample of 475 defendants in the Cook County Bond Court. Item-level data were used to determine which test items exhibited differential item functioning in this population compared with the population used for the original calibration. RESULTS: After removal of nine items that exhibited differential item functioning from the CAT-MH, correlations between scores based on the original calibration from a nonjustice-involved population and the newly computed scores based on a sample of bond court defendants showed a correlation coefficient of r=0.96 to r=0.99. CONCLUSIONS: With a slight modification of the original CAT-MH, the tool was successfully used to measure severity of depression, anxiety, mania and/or hypomania, suicidality, and substance use disorder in an English- and Spanish-speaking criminal justice population.
Source: Psychiatric Services
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: Center for Prevention Implementation Methodology for Drug Abuse and HIV (Ce-PIM), Harnessing Computerized Adaptive Testing, Transdiagnostic Theories of Suicidal Behavior, and Machine Learning to Advance the Emergent Assessment of Suicidal Youth (EASY)., Advancing Intervention Science for Probationers with Serious Mental Illnesses
OpenAlex ID: W2962810192