Juvenile court practitioners use risk assessment to evaluate level of risk and criminogenic areas of need to determine the most appropriate consequence for young offenders, and to determine goals for case planning. Recently, juvenile court practitioners and researchers have gained interest in evaluating young offenders' internal and external strengths, or protective factors. Some scholars assert that incorporating measures of protective factors into the risk assessment process can increase the accuracy of identifying young offenders' odds of recidivating. Relatively few juvenile risk assessment validation studies have evaluated the predictive validity of protective factor items. Moreover, protective factor items that are included in many existing risk assessment tools are narrow in scope, particularly within family-, school-, and community-level protective factor domains. The current study examined the relationship between protective factors and recidivism for 278 young probationers from a Midwestern juvenile county court. The study was conducted in two parts. First, a strengths-based measure of risk of recidivism (Protective Factors for Reducing Juvenile Reoffending, PFRJR) was created and its factor structure and reliability was evaluated. Second, the predictive validity, incremental validity, and differential predictive validity of the PFRJR were examined. In the first study, the author identified two factors, Individual/Community and Family/Social; both subscales demonstrated strong internal consistency. In the second study, the author found no significant differences in mean level composite protective factor scores across gender, however African American offenders had significantly lower protective factor scores than White offenders. The PFRJR significantly predicted recidivism and time-to-recidivism, and produced AUC effect sizes that ranged from small to large for the total sample and across young offender subgroups. The author did not find evidence of differential predictive validity across gender, however the author found differential predictive validity by race/ethnicity. Regarding the incremental validity of protective factor scores, the PFRJR composite scores did not increase the amount of variance explained in recidivism after accounting for the variance explained by composite risk factor scores (as measured by the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory). Broadly, the current study highlights the feasibility of integrating a complementary strengths-based measure into traditional risk assessment procedures. Findings from the current study also contributed to the paucity of risk assessment validation studies that emphasized the predictive validity of protective factor scores.
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