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Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales (WEPSS)
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One of the major challenges within the juvenile justice system is
tailoring psychological assessment services to the specific needs of the
court. Clinicians working within the
court system are frequently called upon to evaluate children and
adolescents and to
provide the court with recommendations regarding rehabilitation,
delinquency, and transfer.
The RSTI helps the clinician to address important juvenile justice
issues and to provide vital information to juvenile court judges, child
and adolescent forensic psychotherapists, parole officers, and other
correctional authorities for making important legal decisions.
The RSTI is a semistructured interview and rating scale designed to help
clinicians assess juvenile offenders ages 9-18 years in three important
areas:
risk for dangerousness, sophistication-maturity, and treatment
amenability.
Each of these areas is measured by a
scale that is composed of 15 items. Additionally, each scale contains
three content areas or clusters.
• The Risk for Dangerousness scale consists of the Violent and
Aggressive Tendencies, Planned and Extensive Criminality, and
Psychopathic Features
clusters.
• The Sophistication-Maturity scale consists of the Autonomy, Cognitive
Capacities, and Emotional Maturity clusters.
• The Treatment Amenability scale consists of the Psychopathology-Degree
and Type, Responsibility and Motivation to Change, and Consideration and
Tolerance of Others clusters.
The RSTI materials include the Professional Manual, the semistructured
Interview Booklet,
and the Rating Form. The Professional Manual provides
detailed
information regarding the reliability and validity of the instrument and
includes six case studies that provide examples
of appropriate scoring and interpretation of the results.
The questions in the 32-page Interview Booklet are designed to help
obtain background,
clinical, and historical information, as well as a sample of the
juvenile's behavioral and psychological functioning. Optional probes are
provided throughout the interview in case
the juvenile gives incomplete
responses. The clinician takes detailed
notes throughout the interview and
data collection process and uses this
information when rating and scoring the inventory. The Rating Form
enables the clinician to score the items by reviewing and synthesizing
information from the entire interview, as well as from other collateral
sources
(e.g., school records, police records, detention records,
previous
treatment records, consultations with parents/guardians). Each item
is
rated on a 3-point scale reflecting the
extent to which the individual
demonstrates the specific characteristic.
Proper administration
and coding of the RSTI requires considerable professional knowledge and
skill with juvenile offenders.
Data for the RSTI normative sample was collected so that the sample
would represent young offenders (ages 9-18 years) across a variety of
juvenile justice settings. The sample included detained and nondetained
youth; juveniles who were transferred to adult court; youth who remained
in juvenile court; violent
and nonviolent offenders; and first-time and
chronic offenders. Normative data
are provided by gender in the
Appendixes of the Professional Manual. Using
these data, scale raw
scores are converted to T scores and percentiles. Additionally, within
each scale, the three cluster raw scores are converted to percentile ranges.
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