RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF THE LEVEL OF SERVICE INVENTORY REVISED AMONG FEDERALLY INCARCERATED SEX OFFENDERS

Nonsexual criminogenic needs are often overlooked in the assessment an d treatment of sex offenders because of the focus and emphasis on issu es surrounding sexual arousal. Augmenting sexual arousal information w ith objective evaluations of nonsexual criminogenic needs offers a com prehensive management and treatment strategy for this type of offender . The Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R) is an objective risk/ need assessment instrument, which has demonstrated considerable promis e among juvenile, adult, and female offender groups. Unfortunately, th ere is no documented research on the LSI-R with sample populations of sex offenders. In this present study, the LSI-R was completed on a rep resentative sample of 216 Canadian, federally incarcerated sex offende rs as parr of an intake assessment. The study sample was composed of 7 4 sexual aggressors of adult victims, 54 extrafamilial child molesters , and 88 familial child molesters. Consistent with previous research a mong nonsexual offenders, the LSI-R displayed acceptable psychometric properties (alpha = .89). Convergent validity was also demonstrated wi th measures of relevant general criminogenic constructs as well as tho se specific to sex offenders (i.e., deviant sexual arousal and denial/ minimization). Additionally, comparisons between the three offender gr oups indicated that familial child molesters scored significantly lowe r on the LSI-R total score as well as on the Criminal History, Educati on/Employment, Accommodation, Companions, and Attitude/Orientation sub components.