Latent profile analysis of psychopathic traits among homicide, general violent, property, and white-collar offenders☆
Section snippets
The present study
It has been noted that psychopathy may be over-diagnosed in criminal populations due to (a) the widespread use of measures based upon behavioral conception of psychopathy (such as the PCL-R) and (b) the utilization of cut-off points derived from the sum of scores, which defies research suggesting that psychopathy is multi-dimensional in character (Boduszek and Debowska, 2016, Boduszek et al., 2015, Debowska et al., 2014b, Kennealy et al., 2010). Although studies using person-centered advanced
Sampling procedure
In this study, we applied systematic sampling procedure to minimize sampling bias and maximize the generalizability of findings. According to the 2015 census, the prison population in the Republic of Poland consists of 76,145 inmates. There are 215 correctional units, including main prisons, remand prisons, and detention centers. For the purpose of the study, we only approached male inmates from randomly selected five maximum and five medium security prisons. Access to those prisons was granted
Results
The fit statistics for the LPA of psychopathy are presented in Table 1 below. The lowest BIC value is observed for the 5-class solution and the Lo-Mendell-Rubin's adjusted likelihood ratio test shows that there is no significant improvement in fit for the 6-class solution. The entropy test confirms the supremacy of the 5-class solution over alternative solutions. On the basis of these statistics, the 5-class solution is considered the best fitting model.
Fig. 1 shows the profile plot for the
Discussion
In spite of the fact that some prior research employed person-oriented methodology to examine the patterns of co-occurrence of psychopathic traits among forensic (e.g., Dhingra et al., 2015, Mokros et al., 2015) and non-forensic (e.g., Coid et al., 2012, Colins et al., 2016) populations, those past studies utilized measures grounded upon behavioral conception of psychopathy (i.e., those including items inquiring into antisocial behavior and/or impulsivity). As such, the current study was the
Conflict of interest
Authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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2020, Journal of Criminal JusticeCitation Excerpt :In addition, we compared the psychopathic profiles on key outcome variables (impulsivity, anxiety, depression, and aggression). Based on findings of prior LPA studies among criminal offenders (Boduszek et al., 2017; Jeon, 2018; Ribeiro da Silva et al., 2019), we expected to find three to five psychopathy profiles in the present study, including one group showing low psychopathy scores and another showing highest psychopathy scores. We also expected that individuals with different profiles would score significantly on those outcome variables (Hicks et al., 2004; Hicks & Patrick, 2006).
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This project was supported by the Polish Prison Service.