Division of Law and Psychiatry, Yale University Department of Psychiatry, 34 Park Street, New Haven, CT 06519, USA.
Behav Sci Law. 2013 Jan-Feb;31(1):74-80. doi: 10.1002/bsl.2045. Epub 2012 Dec 28.
Psychiatrists and psychologists have available structured risk assessment instruments to assess the risk of patient violence. These instruments are also used to help make important legal decisions, including which prisoners will be evaluated for continued detention at the end of their sentence. The predictive validity of structured instruments has been demonstrated in operationally defined groups. Their application to individual cases has led to objections that the standard deviations for the risk categories generated by the instruments overlap significantly. This debate has paid insufficient attention to the differences between aleatory (statistical) and epistemic (degree of confirmation) approaches to uncertainty. The approach to uncertainty in psychiatric violence risk assessment is, of necessity, largely epistemic. Providing statistical data can only be part of establishing the precision of an estimate of the probability of someone acting violently.
精神科医生和心理学家可使用结构化风险评估工具来评估患者暴力风险。这些工具也用于帮助做出重要的法律决策，包括对哪些囚犯在刑期结束时将进行继续拘留评估。结构化工具的预测有效性已在操作性定义的群体中得到证明。将其应用于个别案例导致了反对意见，即仪器生成的风险类别标准差显着重叠。这场辩论对概率论（统计）和认识论（置信度程度）不确定性方法之间的差异关注不够。在精神科暴力风险评估中，对不确定性的处理方法在很大程度上是认识论的。提供统计数据只能是确定某人暴力行为概率估计精度的一部分。
