The Development, Validity, and Reliability of the Minnesota Screening Tool Assessing Recidivism Risk (MnSTARR)

Abstract

This study presents findings on the development, validity, and reliability of the Minnesota Screening Tool Assessing Recidivism Risk (MnSTARR), a prediction instrument that assesses risk for four types of recidivism for male prisoners (sexual, nonsexual violent, nonviolent, and felony) and three types for females prisoners (nonsexual violent, nonviolent, and felony). Logistic regression modeling was used to develop the MnSTARR on 11,375 male offenders and 1,100 females offenders released from Minnesota prisons between 2003 and 2006. Bootstrap resampling was used to not only refine the selection of predictors, but also to internally validate the model. The optimism-corrected area under the curve (AUC) values ranged from .73 to .80 for male offenders and .73 to .81 for female offenders. In addition to showing a relatively high degree of calibration between MnSTARR values and observed recidivism, the results showed the instrument can, for the most part, be scored consistently across raters. Intraclass correlation coefficient values ranged from .79 to .86 for male offenders and .81 to .96 for female offenders.