Assessing violence risk among discharged psychiatric patients: Toward an ecological approach

This paper draws upon data from the Pittsburgh site of the MacArthur Founda tion's Risk Assessment Study, a large-scale study of violence risk among pe rsons discharged from psychiatric hospitals, to examine the effect of the n eighborhood context on risk of violence. This paper has two purposes: (I) t o assess the extent to which the inclusion of neighborhood characteristics enhances violence prediction models-models that traditionally only include individual-level characteristics; and (2) to assess the consistency of indi vidual level risk factors across different neighborhood contexts. Results i ndicate that neighborhood poverty has an impact over and above the effects of individual characteristics in identifying cases with violence. These fin dings support efforts to include neighborhood context in the assessment and management of violence risk among discharged psychiatric patients.