Workplace Assessment of Targeted Violence Risk: The Development and Reliability of theWAVR‐21

Abstract

This study describes the development of the WAVR-21, a structured professional judgment guide for the assessment of workplace targeted violence, and presents initial interrater reliability results. The 21-item instrument codes both static and dynamic risk factors and change, if any, over time. Five critical items or red flag indicators assess violent motives, ideation, intent, weapons skill, and pre-attack planning. Additional items assess the contribution of mental disorder, negative personality factors, situational factors, and a protective factor. Eleven raters each rated 12 randomly assigned cases from actual files of workplace threat scenarios. Summary interrater reliability correlation coefficients (ICCs) for overall presence of risk factors, risk of violence, and seriousness of the violent act were in the fair to good range, similar to other structured professional judgment instruments. A subgroup of psychologists who were coders produced an ICC of 0.76 for overall presence of risk factors. Some of the individual items had poor reliability for both clinical and statistical reasons. The WAVR-21 appears to improve the structuring and organizing of empirically based risk-relevant data and may enhance communication and decision making.

Assessing threats of violence: Professional skill or common sense?

“…However, a participant could have reasoned that suffering from a chronic disease is a stressful condition and should thus be assessed as information that is risk increasing. Such reasoning would be in line with research showing that personal stressors may indeed indicate a higher risk for violence (Meloy et al, ). As the current study did not tap into the participants' reasoning behind their assessments, it remains unknown if (and if so, how) participants connected the information cues to possible risk factors.…”

“…Protective factors are conditions and behaviours that may reduce the risk of violence, which can also be the absence of risk factors (Borum, ). For instance, the information cue Frank joins a running group twice a week indicated the absence of the risk factor “social isolation” (Meloy, White, & Hart, ). In addition to the risk and protective factors, each case held two pieces of neutral information.…”

Predicting non-familial major physical violent crime perpetration in the US Army from administrative data

“…Actuarial methods are needed to determine who is at high risk of perpetrating violence (Fazel et al , 2012, Skeem and Monahan, 2011). A number of actuarial violence prediction tools have been developed for this purpose to screen psychiatric patients (Higgins et al , 2005, Monahan et al , 2005), incarcerated criminals (Berk and Bleich, 2014, Monahan and Skeem, 2014), and workers (LeBlanc and Kelloway, 2002, Meloy et al , 2013) for high-risk preventive interventions, but no such tool has been developed for Regular Army soldiers. One way to do so would be to use the administrative databases available for all soldiers to develop an actuarial model based on modern machine learning methods (Berk, 2008).…”

Threat assessment as a school violence prevention strategy

“…Marshal Service to protect federal officials. Threat assessment has also become widely used to prevent workplace violence (Meloy, White, & Hart, ), to protect public figures and celebrities from stalkers (Hoffman, Meloy, & Sheridan, ), and to prevent domestic violence (Kropp & Cook, ).…”