2 59 PREDICTIVE PROPERTIES DYNAMIC INSTRUMENTS Andrews and Bonta’s (2010) risk and need principles. The instruments can be used to guide the referral of offenders to appropriate treatment approaches and levels, to help aim the focus of the treatment toward criminogenic need factors, and to evaluate the success of the treatment. Although significant, the predictive validity of intra-individual change scores was not at the order of magnitude that would allow them to be used alone, independently, for the estimation of the decrease in recidivism risk after treatment (this research field’s “Holy Grail,” according to Serin et al., 2013). However, we believe change scores of an individual man with a history of sexual offenses have additional value and should be taken into consideration in decision making on supervision and continuation of judicial measures. Furthermore, it could be argued that the somewhat small incremental validity of dynamic over static risk assessment instruments does not justify the additional efforts and costs of using them simultaneously. However, given the importance of making the correct decisions in treatment referral and treatment goals, and to make any effort to further decrease the number of victims of sexual offending behavior, we believe the (additional) use of dynamic risk assessment instruments is both valuable and justified. Obviously, our findings and conclusions are based on currently available instruments. Because the development and use of dynamic risk assessment instruments is still a relatively recent phenomenon, further efforts to improve the value and scope of dynamic risk assessment instruments can be expected to change and add to their value and contribution. Uncovering causal pathways between risk factors and sexual offending behavior may provide more insight into the constructs underlying the risk factors assessed by static and dynamic instruments and may lead to the inclusion of more “psychologically meaningful” risk factors (Mann et al., 2010). On a more practical level, the measurement of individual (dynamic) risk factors may be improved upon, because this momentarily relies on self-report and clinical observation judgment. The development of implicit measures to assess, for instance, hostility toward women or sexual preoccupation in men with a history of sexual offenses, may reduce noise and result in or add to a more reliable assessment. Finally, research on the network structure of dynamic risk factors could provide additional insights and facilitates the development of more valid and clinically useful measures. Network analysis (Borsboom & Cramer, 2013) could help find answers to questions such as how dynamic risk factors interrelate and which dynamic risk factors form key factors in the reduction of the risk of recidivism. Also, this kind of analysis can be used to address questions about whether (some) dynamic risk factors tend to change simultaneously and whether change in (some) factors is conditional upon change in certain other factors. The answers to these and related questions can bring us a step closer to a more accurate and effective assessment of the risk of sexual recidivism, and to our primary goal of building a safer society.
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