Course Details

Course TitleSPCP 2023 - Session 7: Pre-Employment Screening - Exploring and Understanding Base Rates in Pre-Employment Psychological Evaluations of Law Enforcement
Date 9/21/2023
ProviderSociety for Police and Criminal Psychology Annual Conference
Phone 
Emailbrewstja@jmu.edu
Website https://www.policepsychology.org/conference
LocationArlington, TX
Credit Hours0.25
Instructor(s)Benjamin D. Hill, Ph.D.; Nicholas Borgogna, Ph.D.; Stephen L. Aita, Ph.D.; Mandi Musso, Ph.D.
Method of InstructionWorkshop/Seminar
Approving AgencyAPA
Course Syllabus

Course Description

This presentation will cover how to understand the concept of base rates with an emphasis on applying base rate information to actuarial decision-making to improve pre-employment psychological evaluations. The concept of multivariate base rates will be introduced. We will illustrate these ideas using data from over 19,000 individuals who completed a pre-employment psychological evaluation and were followed out for 5 years with reporting of adverse events. The low occurrence of adverse behaviors in law enforcement resulting in termination or resignation makes predicting these outcomes more difficult than is often appreciated. Additionally, the low base rate of adverse events makes using traditional clinical measures problematic as published sensitivity and specificity values for well-known personality tests do not reflect the actual psychometric functioning of these instruments in low base rate situations. We will present multivariate base rate information for the MMPI-2 and MMPI-RF from this pre-employment psychological evaluation database to illustrate these concepts.

Course Objectives