The reliability and validity of the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) in nonincarcerated adolescent males.

Abstract

Current knowledge about the validity of the psychopathy syndrome in youth is limited largely to studies relying on parent-teacher rating scales or slight modifications of adult measures. Recently, the Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) was designed for use with adolescents. However, most studies that have used this measure examined incarcerated males and addressed only validity criteria related to antisocial behavior. We investigated the generality and construct validity of the psychopathy syndrome in an adolescent sample by assessing 115 adolescent males on probation with the PCL:YV. Reliability of measurement was high. PCL:YV ratings predicted not only antisocial behaviour but also other indices of childhood psychopathology, interpersonal behaviors associated with adult psychopathy, and a lack of attachment to parents. These findings suggest that the PCL:YV identifies a syndrome in adolescence consistent with theory and research on adult males.

The relation of psychopathy to concurrent aggression and antisocial behavior in high‐risk adolescent girls and boys

“…These values are largely consistent with other published studies utilizing the PCL:YV in samples of youth on probation or in custody (e.g. Corrado et al, 2004;Forth et al, 2003;Kosson et al, 2002), and are within the same range as mean scores typically seen in samples of incarcerated youth in the U.S. (i.e. 24; Brandt et al, 1997;Forth et al, 2003).…”

“…Items are summed to yield a total score ranging from 0 to 40, with higher scores reflecting the increased presence of psychopathic features. The scoring guidelines for the PCL:YV have been modified to reflect the different expressions of psychopathic characteristics in adolescents of varying ages (Kosson et al, 2002), and require the examiner to compare a youth's behavior to other youth of the same chronological age.…”

“…1 Items on the PCL:YV are purported to retain the same two-factor structure as the PCL-R (i.e. with Factor 1 representing the interpersonal and affective features of psychopathy and Factor 2 encompassing the antisocial behaviors), although several confirmatory factor analyses have indicated that this model does not provide an adequate fit to youth data (Kosson et al, 2002). More recently, results from confirmatory factor analyses published in the PCL:YV manual (Forth et al, 2003) identified both the three-factor (Cooke & Michie, 2001) and two-factor/four-facet (Hare, 2003) models of psychopathy as acceptable test structures in youth samples (see Table 1 for a description of these models).…”

“…In fact, only one published study to date has investigated the validity and reliability of the PCL:YV in a large sample of adolescent females (N ¼ 125; , and no studies have explicitly compared males and females in terms of how psychopathic features manifest themselves and relate to relevant outcomes. Studies using the PCL:YV with all-male samples have generally supported the concurrent and predictive validity of psychopathic features, by showing, for example, that youth with higher scores on the PCL:YV engage in aggressive and delinquent behaviors more often (Forth & Burke, 1998;Kosson et al, 2002), and tend to recidivate violently, more frequently, and in a shorter period of time compared to low-scoring youth (Catchpole & Gretton, 2003;Corrado et al, 2004;Gretton et al, 2004). Notably, in the latter study by Gretton and colleagues (2004), scores on the PCL:YV (coded from archival information) were shown to contribute to the prediction of violent offending over a 10-year retrospective follow-up period once the effects of prior violence, conduct disorder symptoms, and age at first offense were accounted for.…”

“…Over the past decade, adolescent girls have become a prime focus of violence-related research and programming due to significant increases in rates of official violent offending (Puzzanchera, Stahl, Finnegan, Tierney, & Snyder, 2003; Statistics instance, psychopathy is a construct that has received much attention as a robust indicator of risk for violence in adult males (Harris, Rice, & Cormier, 1991;Hemphill, Hare, & Wong, 1998;Salekin, Rogers, & Sewell, 1996), and more recently, adolescent populations (Corrado, Vincent, Hart, & Cohen, 2004;Gretton, Hare, & Catchpole, 2004;Kosson, Cyterski, Steuerwald, Neumann, & Walker-Matthews, 2002). However, despite psychopathy's status as a potent marker of risk, there is a notable lack of research on gender differences in the relation of psychopathic characteristics to aggression and violence.…”