Case Formulation

• driven by theory
• case formulation is a narrative so uses natural language
• case formulations are diachronic, which means they look back in the past, look to the future, and look at the present
• phase 1 is the offender analysis, allows clinical, forensic and counselling psychologistsin a clinical setting to understand the behaviour and the stages leading to the offence to identity the criminorgenic facts
• phase 1: they look at the timeline of the criminal event, people involved, the antecedents and consequences, internal/external motivation behind the act, this allows a deeper understanding of why the offender elicited this behaviour
• phase 1: flow diagram is used to simplify complex behaviours and identifies early experiences that lead to core beliefs
• phase 2, understanding the offender, underpinning psychological behaviour and linking it to a known theory
• phase 2: future acts are predicted, allows psychologists to understand what might happen and what situations could be triggering, as well as predicting potential victims
• phase 3: applying treatment, psychologists reflect on how the offender started committing crimes and why, wether they have a mental health problem, i.e, anxiety
• phase 3: reassess the individual (testable as Hart et al said) after a period of time to assess how the treatment is working, chance to reflect on their situation
• HCPC guidelines used to ensure that standardisation, maintaining confidentiality and quality of practise
• McKnight found that case formulation did predict effective treatment
• Whitehead et al used the Good Lives Model and did a case study of a high risk offender, they found that criminorgenic needs must be targeted with intensity
• Good Lives Model can be constructed with the RNR model, focuses on personal identity and goals
• RNR model has been criticised by some because it doesn't consider the social context or environment which may influence criminal behaviour
• Bonta & Andrews developed the RNR model, it was based on the idea that recidivism could be reduced if three factors were addressed - responsivity, need reduction and risk management
• responsivity refers to the way an individual responds to treatment, e.g., motivation, learning style, personality traits
• Responsivity is about matching interventions to individual characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity etc.
• risk refers to the likelihood of reoffending, this includes static and dynamic risk factors
• Mr C: violent offender, showed lots of violence in prison, serial sex offender, disclosed violence apart from what he'd been convicted of, in an interview he talked about his family nackground of violence and sex abuse, he joined a gang at a young age and lived with two female prostitutes, exposed to early modelled forced sex
• strength: formulation is in depth and generates lots of information about the offender, enables the offender to understand their issues and able to treat them
• weakness: subject to lots of bias, psychologists need to interpret the scenarious provided by the offender, cant let bias impact their decisions, findings could be skewed and could make it less credible
• lots of research to support the usefulness of case formulations from Whitehead et al and Connell both concluded that case formulations were useful
• However, self report data is used throughout the researchers, usefulness of data is dep on how much the the offender is willing to share with the psychologist. Mr C's situation was only so helpful because he opened uo to the psychologist
• Provides useful applications as enables psychologists to understand criminal mindsets and what causes crimnorgenic factors
• weakness: many practical issues at hand, time consuming and costly, some prisoners missed.