Poorly written police reports interfere with the efficient functioning of the criminal justice system. Accounts from several police jurisdictions have indicated that many officers lack the necessary writing skills to complete reports which require documenting chronological events in an incident, reporting witness statements, and describing evidence. This study attempted to identify the important dimensions of police report writing. On this foundation, a job-related video test was developed and its psychometric properties investigated. The test, the New Orleans Police Department Written Communication Test (NWCT), was designed to assess the report writing skills of New Orleans Police Department Recruits and Officers. Two versions of the test were developed, each having direct and indirect subtests. Subjects were 110 police officers who had been on the job one to two years. Internal consistency, alternate forms reliability, interscorer reliability, intraclass reliability, and test-retest reliability were estimated. Reliability was also estimated within a generalizability framework with persons and raters as facets. Both forms of the NWCT were administered to the officers as well as Hammill and Larsen's (1988) Test of Written Language-2 (TOWL-2). The TOWL-2 was administered to the officers to estimate the convergent validity of the NWCT. Convergent validity was also assessed by determining the relationship between NWCT scores and other measures of writing skills. Subjects' police reports were rated by Assistant District Attorneys and police personnel whose ratings served as criteria. Internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) estimates differed by subtest, and the overall test lacked internal consistency (both Forms A and B). Alternate forms reliability coefficient was extremely low (.22) for the alternate direct subtests. The test-retest coefficient was.73 ($p < .001$) for the indirect portions of the test which were identical for both forms of the test. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to estimate the variance components for the effects of raters, persons, and the interaction between raters and persons. A large amount of variance was attributed to differences in how raters scored subjects for the direct subtests. With the indirect subtests, however, much of the variance was attributed to differences in the test performance of the subjects. Convergent validity evidence was weak, although the NWCT did correlate significantly with some of the variables of interest. Criterion-related validity evidence, using ratings of work samples as criteria, was insufficient / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_24415 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Contributors | Pettaway, Michelle Marcia (Author), Sulzer, Jefferson L (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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