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Predicting Day Treatment Program Completion with the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles taking Defensiveness into Account

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Abstract

The first objective of this study was to determine whether the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) General Criminal Thinking (GCT) score correlated negatively with program completion in a group of 199 (123 male, 76 female) day treatment clients across several different levels of defensiveness. The second objective was to ascertain whether the GCT continued to predict program completion in a logistic regression analysis when age, sex, race, educational level, marital status, drug offense, and prior arrests were controlled. Results indicated that while the GCT did not predict program completion in the full sample, it did so when clients with moderately high to very high scores on the PICTS defensiveness-revised scale (≥ T-score 55) were removed from the analysis. It would appear that elevated levels of defensiveness may impede the predictive validity of the PICTS GCT score, at least when it comes to assessing program completion in day reporting clients.

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The author received no funding for this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA, 19530-0730, USA

    Glenn D. Walters

  2. Criminal Justice and Recovery Services, Harrisburg, PA, USA

    Jacqueline M. Loftus, Susan C. Wright & Kimberly D. Ernest

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  1. Glenn D. Walters
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  2. Jacqueline M. Loftus
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  3. Susan C. Wright
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  4. Kimberly D. Ernest
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Correspondence to Glenn D. Walters.

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This study was approved by the Kutztown University Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Conflict of Interest

The lead author of this paper is also the author of the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) and has received small remuneration for sale of the PICTS manual in the past.

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We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.

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Walters, G.D., Loftus, J.M., Wright, S.C. et al. Predicting Day Treatment Program Completion with the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles taking Defensiveness into Account. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 45, 88–96 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-023-10024-0

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