The purpose of this study was threefold: (a) develop, validate, and compare two
measures, viewing time and choice reaction time, that sexual content induced delay
(SCID; Geer & Bellard, 1996) among youth non-sexual offenders, university students,
and adults who had sexually offended, (b) address some of the methodological
weaknesses in prior research, and (c) examine the measures’ clinical utility by
investigating their predictive validity via estimates of sensitivity and specificity. Viewing
time (VT) assesses how long an individual takes to view an image of a single person
while completing a task, and choice reaction time (CRT) measures how quickly and
accurately an individual indicates to which category (there must be two or more from
which the participant can choose) the presented stimulus belongs. I administered the two
measures plus questionnaires on sexual orientation (Friedman et al., 2004) and social
desirability (BIDR-6; Paulhus, 1991) to three samples: youth non-sexual offenders,
university students, and adult sex offender. I examined the clinical utility of the measures
by investigating their predictive validity via ROC estimates of sensitivity and specificity.
Each measure consisted of a preset randomized presentation of computer-modified
clothed male and female images of various ages. There are five central results from this
study. First, both the VT and CRT measures produced subtest scores with high reliability,
via item and scale analysis, with all three samples, and there appears to be one dominant
underlying construct for both measures. Second, there were significant differences
between the adult sexual offenders and the youth non-sexual offenders when assessed
with the VT measures, but not between the youth non-sexual offenders and the university
students. In this study, neither age nor education influenced these results. Third, there
were significant differences between youth non-sexual offenders and the university
sample when assessed with the CRT measure, but not between the adult sex offenders
and either the youth non-sexual offenders or university students. Fourth, as evidenced by
point two and three, the VT and CRT measures provided significantly different results.
Finally, the VT measure demonstrated excellent clinical utility in its ability to
differentiate adult heterosexual sexual offenders from non-sexual offenders (for example,
AUC = 0.87 female mature images, 0.88 male child images).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1234 |
| Date | 29 October 2008 |
| Creators | Gress, Carmen L. Z. |
| Contributors | Anderson, John O. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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