Dangerousness, Prediction of

Prior to the 1990s, the term prediction of dangerousness was used to describe what is now referred to as violence risk assessment. Although legal statutes continue to use the term dangerousness, mental health professionals now typically use the term violence risk. Four generations of violence risk models and corresponding assessment measures have been developed. Actuarial measures, which use evidence-based static (i.e., historical, stable) measures to produce an aggregate estimate of risk, were developed in response to the inferiority of unstructured clinical judgments, but actuarial measures have since been found to essentially perform similarly to structured professional judgment (SPJ) measures, which use both static and dynamic measures to produce a nonaggregated estimate of risk level. Both types of approaches have limitations. SPJ measures have been criticized ...