Comparing Gender Differences and Similarities in How Risks and Strengths Cluster to Form Profiles of Justice-Involved Youth: A Latent Profile Analysis

Classifying Justice-Involved Males in Iowa: A Latent Class Analysis with the Dynamic Risk Assessment for Offender Re-Entry (DRAOR)

“…Moreover, a five-class model was more parsimonious and simpler to interpret when compared to a six-class solution and was also in agreement with previous research focusing on the distribution of risk and need for justice-involved males (which suggest a three to five class/profile model for males; Piquero, 2008;Wanamaker, 2020;Wagstaff, 2020). Therefore, the five-class solution was determined to be the appropriate model and best fit the data.…”

“…Hypothesis 3A. Previous research on risk and need with justice-involved populations have found mixed results regarding the distribution of age across typologies with some finding no significant differences in distributions across classes/profiles (Lloyd et al, 2019;Wannamaker, 2020;Wagstaff, 2020; and some suggesting that there are age differences (Campbell et al, 2019;Schwalbe et al, 2008;Wojciechowski, 2020). Notably, the majority of the aforementioned studies were conducted with justice-involved adolescents resulting in restricted age ranges.…”

“…These techniques offer insight into the unique etiologies of offending behaviour by grouping justiceinvolved individuals based on a set of shared characteristics, allowing the researcher to uncover "hidden" or "latent" subgroups within large heterogeneous populations (Brushett, 2013;Helfgott, 2008;Oberski, 2016;Williams & Kibowski, 2016). This contrasts with variable-centered approaches that examine the direct relationships between specific variables and probabilities of risk (Wagstaff, 2020), without consideration for individual variation.…”

“…Pertaining to the examination of racial distribution within typology research, a substantial number of studies have suggested differences in the distribution across classes/profiles (Schwalbe et al, 2008;Campbell et al, 2019;Ford et al, 2013;Cusworth Walker, 2016;Wagstaff, 2020;Wannamaker, 2020) while others have found no differences in racial distribution Charak et al, 2019). Notably, barring Wannamaker (2020), the aforementioned research has focused on justice-involved youth.…”

“…Previous research with the DRAOR has found the measure to be predictive of both technical violations (Chadwick, 2014) and any revocation (Hanby, 2013). Additionally, prior typological research based on risk assessment has demonstrated that recidivism rates can vary as a function of resultant latent groups (Campbell et al, 2019;Hilterman et al, (2019); Wagstaff, 2020;Wanamaker, 2020). Therefore, it was hypothesized that the relationship between recidivism outcomes and the DRAOR scores would vary across classes.…”