Coxell, Adrian William; (2000) Association between recidivism risk and scores on psychological measures and outcome of therapy in sex offenders. Dissimulation, coping and defence styles in sex-offenders, non-sex offenders and non-offenders. Doctoral thesis (D.Clin.Psy), UCL (University College London).

Text Association_between_recidivism.pdf Download (5MB)

Abstract

This thesis comprises three studies. Study 1 investigates the relationship between scores on psychological measures and risk of recidivism in sex-offenders. Study 2 investigates the relationship between level of recidivism risk and outcome of group therapy for sex-offenders. Study 3 investigates dissimulation, and defence and coping styles in sex-offenders, non-sex offenders, and non-offenders. Study 1 found no significant relationship between level of risk of recidivism and scores on measures of anger, self-esteem, psychosexual variables and cognitive distortions in one hundred and sixteen sex-offenders. Only the variable anger control increased consistently between risk of recidivism categories (although this effect was not significant). These findings are discussed with regard to differences in sexoffenders (i.e. appetitive vs non-appetitive: Hudson and Ward, 1999) and research indicating that acute changes in psychological state significantly predict recidivism (Hanson and Harris, submitted, a, b). Study 2 compared outcome after twelve months of group therapy for sex-offenders at lower (n = 28) and higher (n = 22) risk of recidivism. No significant group differences were found between the groups on three outcome measures, although summary data were consistent with the hypothesis. Possible reasons for the failure to find significant group differences are discussed, including the possibility that treatment dropouts and therapy exclusion criteria may have affected the results. Study 3 found that a discriminant function analysis significantly discriminated between sex-offenders, non-sex offenders and non-offenders. Dissimulation was significantly more prevalent in the sex-offender group. A discriminant function labelled adaptive coping was the best discriminator between the sex-offenders and the other groups (non-offender, non-sex offender). A speculative model of sex-offending in non-appetive sex offenders based on the results of Study 3 and a finding from Study 1, and incorporating failure in selfregulation (Muraven and Baumeister, 2000) and the cognitive deconstructed state (Baumeister, 1991) is presented. Clinical implications of the research considered within the thesis are presented last.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Archive Staff Only

View Item