A Meta-Analysis of Juvenile Justice Risk Assessment Instruments

Abstract

Juvenile justice systems have widely adopted risk assessment instruments to support judicial and administrative decisions about sanctioning severity and restrictiveness of care. A little explored property of these instruments is the extent to which their predictive validity generalizes across gender. The article reports on a meta-analysis of risk assessment predictive validity with male and female offenders. Nineteen studies encompassing 20 unique samples met inclusion criteria. Findings indicated that predictive validity estimates are equivalent for male and female offenders and are consistent with results of other meta-analyses in the field. The findings also indicate that when gender differences are observed in individual studies, they provide evidence for gender biases in juvenile justice decision-making and case processing rather than for the ineffectiveness of risk assessment with female offenders.