Development, Reliability, and Validity of an Inventory for the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression

• NCJ Number: 147088
• Journal: Criminal Justice and Behavior Volume: 21 Issue: 1 Dated: special issue (March 1994) Pages: 72-94
• Author(s): R A Knight; R A Prentky; D D Cerce
• Date Published: 1994
• Length: 23 pages
• Grant Number(s): MH 32309; 82-IJ-CX-0058
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute of Justice (NIJ); National Institute of Mental Health; US Dept of Justice NIJ Pub
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Measurement/Evaluation Device
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: NIJ Reprint

Annotation

This article presents the results of an assessment of the preliminary administration of the Multidimensional Assessment of Sex and Aggression (MASA), which is designed to assess sexual and aggressive thoughts, fantasies, and behaviors.

Abstract

The impetus for developing MASA evolved from programmatic work on the classification of sexual offenders. To classify rapists in the Massachusetts Treatment Center Rapist typology, Version 3, detailed information on several dimensions is required, including social competence, expressive aggression, sadism, juvenile and adult general aggression, and antisocial behavior, undifferentiated anger, offense planning, and various aspects of sexual behavior and deviance. To supplement the often poorly represented information in archival records and to provide an assessment tool to gather sufficient data to categorize offenders, the MASA was created. The MASA was administered to 127 sexual offenders, and after a 6-month interval, a subsample of 35 offenders repeated the inventory. The preliminary reliability and validity data that are presented support the usefulness of the MASA for assessing the domains necessary for classification. 3 tables and 43 references