Unpacking Multiagency Structured Professional Judgment Risk Assessments for Family Violence

Abstract

Assessing the risk for future harm is a crucial task for agencies managing Family Violence (FV) cases. The Integrated Safety Response (ISR) is a multiagency collaboration of such agencies operating in two areas of New Zealand, and one of the first steps in their process is to perform a risk assessment. However, in these assessments, it is unclear whether the factors ISR triage team members select are the basis for their overall risk categorization (low, medium, or high), and if those factors are risk factors (i.e., empirical predictors of outcomes). Therefore, in this study we documented the factors ISR triage teams recorded during their risk assessments for 842 FV cases and examined the relationship of those factors with the risk categories. We then investigated whether those factors and the risk categories were indeed capable of predicting FV-related outcomes (recurrence and physical recurrence). We found most of the triage teams’ recorded factors were associated with the risk categories, but fewer than half of the factors were associated with FV-related outcomes. Moreover, the risk categories predicted FV-related outcomes better than chance, but their predictive ability varied across subgroups, performing poorly for aggressors who were Māori or women, and for non-intimate partner cases. We concluded that the ISR triage teams’ risk assessment protocol may benefit from increased structure and validation.