The specific responsivity principle advises us to provide offenders with treatment that takes into account their responsiveness to treatment, tied for example to their learning style, motivation, and gender. We examine challenges to service engagement and attendance in a community-based program in a reentry setting, and consider how far they correspond with these factors. Drawing on qualitative accounts of parolee engagement in services provided by parolees, service providers, case managers, and parole officers, we identify a number of difficulties faced by clients. These include logistical factors that affect clients' physical ability to enroll in or attend programming (such as documentation, employment needs, and transportation problems) as well as elements of program and service delivery (such as client-provider matching, therapeutic style, and curriculum factors). We conclude that we should look beyond responsivity and consider logistical factors alongside the better-recognized psychological and dispositional factors, to understand client engagement in the context of reentry.

Past research on victimization has relied predominantly on individuals' awareness of and willingness to self-report a victimization experience and its effect on self and identity processes. The present research adopts theoretical and methodological innovations in implicit social cognition research to provide a new perspective on how a violent victimization experience might influence identity processes outside of conscious awareness. Our main goal was to test whether individuals who have victimization experience implicitly associate the self with victims (implicit victim identity) and their stereotypes (implicit victim self-stereotyping), and the relation of these associations to explicit victim identity and self-stereotyping. Two pretests with undergraduate student participants ( Ns = 122 and 72) identified victim-related word stimuli for two Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT) measures of implicit victim identity and self-stereotyping. In Pretest Study A, participants read crime vignettes and listed words that described a victim, then in Pretest Study B, participants rated these words on victim relatedness and valence. The Main Study recruited undergraduate student participants ( N = 101) who completed the SC-IATs, self-report measures of explicit victim identity and self-stereotyping, and victimization experiences. Three of our five hypotheses were supported. Individuals with past victimization experience exhibited strong explicit victim identity and self-stereotyping, but not implicit victim identity and self-stereotyping, relative to those with no victimization experience. Explicit and implicit victim identity and self-stereotyping were unrelated. Finally, among individuals with victimization experience, a strong implicit victim identity was associated with strong implicit victim self-stereotyping. This research has implications for understanding the processes underlying revictimization and for preventing further victimization.

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Contextually salient social identities are those that individuals may not think of often but that may be temporarily activated by relevant situational cues. We hypothesized that victim, one of many identities people may possess, is a contextually salient identity that operates both implicitly and explicitly. To test this hypothesis, the present research tests the effect of a situational victimization cue on implicit and explicit self-victim associations. We utilized an experiment with a 2 (Victimization salience: yes vs. no) × 2 (Past victimization experience: yes vs. no) between-participants design. One hundred eighty-one undergraduate student participants were recruited and randomized into one of two conditions: (a) an experimental condition reminding them of a previous victimization experience or (b) a control condition whereby they did not receive a reminder. All participants then completed one Single-Category Implicit Association Test, and self-report measures of explicit self-victim associations and victimization experience. Between-participants analyses of variance were used to analyze data. Results indicated that individuals who were reminded of a previous victimization exhibited stronger explicit and implicit self-victim associations compared to those who were not reminded. This research provides initial evidence that victim is a contextually salient identity, which has implications for the factors and processes underlying identity formation, revictimization, and the prevention of repeat victimization.

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