Structured assessment of protective factors: a German pilot study in sex offenders
Abstract
The present study investigated the relationship between risk and protective factors in sex offenders and tested the feasibility of the instrument in an outpatient setting using the German version of the Structured Assessment of PROtective Factors (SAPROF) for violence risk. The study was conducted with 30 clients in the FORensic Ambulatory program for Sex offenders (FORAS) at the Institute for Sex Research and Forensic Psychiatry (ISF) in Hamburg, Germany. Correlations between the assessment data collected using the SAPROF, SVR-20, and Static-99 were analyzed. Both risk judgments and sum scores of the SVR-20 and the SAPROF showed a significantly negative correlation, whereas there was no significant link found between the SAPROF and the Static-99. The connection of the SAPROF to the SVR-20 but not to the Static-99 reflects the dynamic characteristic of the instrument. Despite the limited generalizability due to the small sample size, the German SAPROF seemed to be helpful for the structured assessment of protective factors.