Jennifer Lavoie

Violence risk assessment : Principles and models bridging prediction to management

Foreword by Professor David P. Farrington Part I: Risk assessment - current perspectives 1. Violence risk assessment, Jennifer Lavoie, Laura Guy and Kevin Douglas 2. Sexual offender risk assessment: research, evaluation, best practice recommendations, and future directions, Douglas P. Boer and Stephen Hart 3. Domestic violence and stalking risk assessment, Randall Kropp Part II: Clinical assessment - current perspectives 4. Therapeutic assessment issues to consider with violent offenders, Jane L. Ireland 5. Assessing therapeutic needs for sex offenders, Leigh Harkins and Tony Beech 6. Assessing the clinical needs for stalking and domestic violence, Werner Tschan Part III: Treatment and management - current perspectives 7. Treatment approaches for violence, Jane L. Ireland 8. Treatment approaches for sexual violence, Carol A. Ireland and Rachel Worthington 9. Implications for treatment approaches for interpersonal violence: stalking and domestic, Niki Graham-Kevan and Stefanie Ashton Wigman 10. In their own worlds: the relationship between thinking and doing for convicted paedophiles, David Wilson and Tim Jones 11. Comparative analysis of the management of sex offenders within the USA and UK, Bill Hebenton 12. Challenges of managing the risk of violent and sexual offenders in the community, Tom Considine and Philip Birch

Outcome Trajectories among Homeless Individuals with Mental Disorders in a Multisite Randomised Controlled Trial of Housing First

Purpose: Housing First (HF) has been shown to improve housing stability, on average, for formerly homeless adults with mental illness. However, little is known about patterns of change and characteristics that predict different outcome trajectories over time. This article reports on latent trajectories of housing stability among 2140 participants (84% followed 24 months) of a multisite randomised controlled trial of HF. Methods: Data were analyzed using generalised growth mixture modeling for the total cohort. Predictor variables were chosen based on the original program logic model and detailed reviews of other qualitative and quantitative findings. Treatment group assignment and level of need at baseline were included in the model. Results: In total, 73% of HF participants and 43% of treatment-as-usual (TAU) participants were in stable housing after 24 months of follow-up. Six trajectories of housing stability were identified for each of the HF and TAU groups. Variables that distinguished different trajectories included gender, age, prior month income, Aboriginal status, total time homeless, previous hospitalizations, overall health, psychiatric symptoms, and comorbidity, while others such as education, diagnosis, and substance use problems did not. Conclusion: While the observed patterns and their predictors are of interest for further research and general service planning, no set of variables is yet known that can accurately predict the likelihood of particular individuals benefiting from HF programs at the outset.

Relative invisibility: an integrative review of carer’s lived experiences of a family member’s emergency mental health crisis

ABSTRACT An integrative review was conducted to evaluate and synthesize the current state of knowledge of family carers’ experiences of emergency psychiatric crises of an adult relative. A literature review was performed by searching key terms in EBSCO (CINAHL, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Social Work Abstracts), and Proquest (MEDLINE, PsycINFO) citation databases; 3,350 citations were retrieved and screened for inclusion. Data synthesis of 25 articles meeting inclusion criteria revealed the following five themes: building to crisis; conflicted emotional experience; police apprehension; invisible experts; and “need to know.” Findings provide essential insight into family carers experiences and needs during crisis that is informative for emergency mental health response practices.

Constructing a Public Narrative of Regulations for Big Data and Analytics: Results From a Community-Driven Discussion

This article reports on community perspectives about the regulation of municipality-led Big Data initiatives developed through an exploratory, deliberative democracy-informed approach. While analytics hold great promise for policy design and service delivery improvements, their mythologized nature may elicit a blind faith in empirical outcomes, leading to misrepresentation or omission of marginalized populations. Scholars have begun pointing to public consultation as a means of avoiding these challenges, suggesting that a truly “smart city” should vet potential Big Data polices through the community in order to identify locally relevant concerns. The Big Data in Cities: Barriers and Benefits symposium, held in May of 2017, took a deliberative democracy approach designed to contribute toward a midsized southern Ontario city’s regulatory framework for data aggregation and mobilization. Approximately 100 self-selected participants (primarily public advocates) attended a 2-day symposium that featured a series of presentations designed to introduce critiques to and strategies for the implementation of Big Data initiatives. Participants also engaged in several facilitated roundtable discussions during the symposium, and their transcribed conversations served as the data for this study. Thematic analysis identified three recurrent concerns: publicly vetted data ethics, consultation and literacy practices, and regulatory frameworks. The public consultation process employed by this study produced results that reflect critiques raised in other academic papers.