Study designs of evaluations included in the review
No restrictions were placed on study design.
Specific interventions included in the review
The interventions were the PCL and PCL-R.
Reference standard test against which the new test was compared
All studies using the index tests to predict the occurrence of violent or non-violent recidivism were eligible for inclusion. The occurrence of recidivism was, therefore, the reference standard.
Participants included in the review
No inclusion criteria relating to the participant characteristics were specified. The participants in the included studies were males recruited from federal medium-security prisons, maximum-security youth detention centres, therapeutic community programmes (medical out-patients), forensic treatment centres for sexual offenders, or they were forensic psychiatric patients.The participants were classified as either violent offenders, non-violent offenders, recidivators, non-recidivators, sadistic rapists, non-sadistic rapists, or mixed. Where reported, the mean age of the participants ranged from 16.3 to 39.1 years.
Outcomes assessed in the review
No inclusion criteria relating to the outcome measures were specified. The sensitivities, specificities, positive predictive powers, and negative predictive powers of the psychopathy checklists were reported for the individual studies. Where reported, the cut-off score for dangerousness and recidivism ranged from greater than 18 to greater than 33. The outcome measures in the review were the effect sizes for the ability of the psychopathy checklists to predict violence, recidivism, and deviant sexual arousal and sexual sadism.
How were decisions on the relevance of primary studies made?
The authors do not state how the papers were selected for the review, or how many of the reviewers performed the selection.