The attempted and actual assault scale (attacks)

Abstract

The Attempted and Actual Assault Scale (Attacks) was designed to record the nature and severity of inpatient assaults. To explore the psychometric properties of the Scale, a videotape of interpersonal assaults was compiled with clips from regular television broadcasts. During a meeting of the European Violence in Psychiatry Research Group (EVIPRG), 22 members from 14 different countries were instructed to rate the videotaped assaults on both the MOAS and the Attacks. Inter-rater reliability--in terms of intra-class correlation coefficients--was 0.70 for Attacks and 0.48 for MOAS severity scores. Attacks severity scores turned out to be significantly associated with the judgments of the raters about the severity of the observed assaults (Spearman's rho = 0.70). It is concluded that the psychometric properties of the newly developed Attacks are promising.