Week 4 written assignment topics and requirements

¶ … Size Analysis

The author of this report is asked to speak to a number of answers surrounding a forensic psychology-related article. The author of this report found a study that relates to the prediction of behavior for sex offenders in a jail environment once the offender is incarcerated. The author is asked to describe the sample size, characteristics and sample selection and how all of the above influenced the study.

Study Described

The study notes that the overall prison population in the United States is 1.4 million with 100,000 of those being in prison for sexual offenses. The study notes that offenders are classified by their prior crimes and other conduct as well as the predicted conduct of those same people once they are in jail. Reasons for classifying and shifting people would include gang affiliations, the type of offense and so forth. The type of offense in particular is important because gangs usually scrap in prison just like they do on the streets and sex offenders are often targets of violence due to the nature of their crimes and the likelihood of this is heightened greatly if the victim of said crime was a minor or otherwise vulnerable (Caperton, Edens & Johnson, 2004).

The study notes that while many studies have looked at the Personality Assessment Inventory, a tool used to classify offenders for institutionalization, as applied to all types of offenders. However, the study notes that very few other studies have zeroed in on sex offenders in particular. This study used a sample of 92 sex offenders overall with subsamples therein. For example, a subsample of 58 of those 92 offenders showed strong correlations with misconduct of all sorts (Caperton, Edens & Johnson, 2004)

The samples, both the higher one and the subsamples, were looked at in terms of average age for the offenders and their crimes overall. A different sample looked at 144 offenders incarecerated only in Texas and 137 of those 144 completed the PAI as mentioned above to help classify them. The average age of this 144 people was 36.99 years. The same sample was pretty racially diverse given that roughly half was white, 35% was black, 16.1% was Hispanic and the other 0.7% was something else (Caperton, Edens & Johnson, 2004).

As for how all of this impacts the study, a sample of less than 100 or 200 people in a larger pool of 100,000 is pretty small. However, to have a sample near or above 100 is still not bad although the sample should have been larger for the Texas sample since they have such a large share of the United States population and, probably, the population of sex offenders as well. Even with the size of the sample being small, the results showed a standard deviation of just over one-half over the course of its analysis so the sample is probably pretty reliable. That being said, standard deviation can vary for reasons other than the sample being paltry.