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Article
Differential Racial/Ethnic Predictive Validity
Youth Violence an Juvenile Justice (2014)
  • Howard M Henderson, Texas Southern University
Abstract
Recent findings indicate that including White offenders in the sample biases the predictability of risk and needs assessment instruments. As a result, this study examines the predictability of the Los Angeles County Needs Assessment Instrument (LAC) on a sample of African American and Hispanic juvenile probationers. Given that the extant literature focuses on regression analysis, to the curtailment of error analysis, this study also provides a unique examination of predictive error. The results suggest that the instrument under examination predicts better for Hispanics than African Americans. Of the two minority groups, the needs assessment instrument demonstrated the greatest effect size for Hispanic probationers. The LAC performed 16% better than chance predictions when classifying Hispanic juveniles. The area under the curve value was nonsignificant for African American juvenile probationers. The situating of our research findings, their limitations, suggestions for future research, and policy implications are discussed.
Keywords
  • predictive validity,
  • juvenile probation,
  • needs assessment,
  • predictive error,
  • race/ethnicity
Disciplines
Publication Date
2014
Citation Information
Howard M Henderson. "Differential Racial/Ethnic Predictive Validity" Youth Violence an Juvenile Justice Vol. 12 Iss. 2 (2014)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/howard_henderson/6/