Method 134

5.3.1 Participants. For the current analyses, offender participants were re- grouped, such that rapists and non-sexual offenders were combined to form a non- child-sex offender control group (n = 67). This change was motivated by there being no theoretical reason to distinguish between these offenders when examining

attitudes towards child-sex offence-supportive beliefs. The demographic characteristics of this combined group, and how they differ from the other

experimental groups on these variables, are described in Appendix A. The child-sex offender (n = 48) and community control groups (n = 70) remained unchanged for these analyses.

- 135 - 5.3.2 Measures.

5.3.2.1 The Implicit Theories Self-Report scale (ITSR; see Appendix L).

Self-reported endorsement of child-sex ITs was assessed using the newly designed ITSR. The ITSR is a 62-item self-report questionnaire designed to assess the full range of ITs implicated in child-sex (Ward & Keenan, 1999) and violent offending (Polaschek et al., 2009), along with self-reported attraction to children and

virtuous/deviant responding patterns. Respondents were asked to indicate the extent to which each item characterised their personal beliefs on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). Higher scores indicated greater IT endorsement, attraction to children, or evidence of aberrant responding. Of current interest are the five subscales designed to assess the child-sex ITs proposed by Ward and Keenan (1999), and those designed to detect virtuous/deviant responding.

Each child-sex IT subscale contained five items considered to reflect beliefs that would either support or contradict that particular IT (see Appendix L for a list of all subscale items). Whilst some were based on, or taken directly from, the ITQ (Goddard, 2006), others were drawn from a broader range of existing offence- supportive belief questionnaires, using the comprehensive classification conducted by Gannon et al. (2009). Final item selection was informed by the original IT descriptions provided by Ward and Keenan (1999), and each subscale contained items that were both congruent and incongruent with the respective IT, to discourage adoption of a biased response set. To ensure questions contained within the ITSR would be accessible to offender populations, each item was checked against the Bristol norms (Stadthagen-Gonzalez & Davis, 2006) and MRC psycholinguistic database

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ensure that the words used were typically acquired by the age of 10.38 If any words were found to have an age of acquisition above 10, they were replaced with a more suitable synonym, using an online thesaurus.

The virtuous responding subscale was designed to detect attempts to portray the self in an unrealistically positive light, whilst the deviant responding subscale consisted of unusual items designed to detect deliberate malingering or the

development of a biased response set (i.e., consistent “yea- or nay –saying”). Items within these scales were also newly generated for the ITSR, due to concerns that offender participants may be familiar with items contained within existing,

commercially available measures, as a result of prior assessment within the prison system. As development of the ITSR represented a supplementary aim of the current investigation, its reliability is discussed within sections 5.4.1 and 5.4.3.

5.3.2.2 The children as sexual SC-IAT (see Appendix J). The children as

sexual SC-IAT was designed to assess whether respondents more strongly associated children with sexuality or innocence. Participants were shown words related to the target category of children (e.g., “boy”, “girl”, “infant”), and the attribute categories of I (e.g., “flirty”, “tempt”, “lust”) versus innocent (e.g.,

“naive”, “virgin”, “pure”). Response latencies were compared between trials when words related to children were paired on a response key with innocent and when paired with sexual. Faster responding when children were paired with sexuality, relative to innocence, would produce a positive D score, consistent with

endorsement of the children as sexual beings IT. In contrast, faster responding

38

Based on estimates that almost 40% of offenders have literacy levels below that expected of an 11 year old (National Audit Office, 2008).

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when children were paired with innocent would produce a negative D score, suggesting an absence of beliefs consistent with this IT.

5.3.2.3 The dangerous world SC-IAT (see Appendix J). Given that both

variants of the dangerous world IT feature the belief that adults are hostile and dangerous, the dangerous world SC-IAT was designed to assess whether respondents more strongly associated adults with safety or danger. Participants were shown words related to the target category of adults (e.g., “man”, “woman”, “grown-up”), and the attribute categories of dangerous (e.g., “risky”, “threat”, “harmful”) versus safe (e.g., “harmless”, “trust”, “friendly”). Response latencies were compared between trials when words related to adults were paired on a response key with safe and when paired with dangerous. Faster responding when adults were paired with danger, relative to safety, would produce a positive D score, consistent with endorsement of the dangerous world IT. In contrast, faster

responding when adults were paired with safety would produce a negative D score, suggesting an absence of beliefs consistent with this IT.

5.3.4 Statistical analysis. Internal and test re-test reliability was examined for each of the IT-related variables. The degree of inter-relation between individual IT variables was assessed using zero-order correlations. Descriptive statistics were calculated according to group for all IT variables and differences between these groups were assessed using ANOVAs.

To examine the predictive validity of each IT variable, scores on the OGRS- 3 and Static-99R were correlated with each of the SC-IAT and self-report IT measures. Linear multiple regression analyses were also calculated to a) account for the potential influence of shared variance, and b) determine whether the SC- IATs added incrementally to prediction achieved by self-report subscales alone.

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Within these analyses, scores on the OGRS-3 and Static-99R were regressed onto the IT measures using a 2-step hierarchical forced entry model. Self-reported IT variables were entered at step 1, followed by SC-IAT scores at step 2. At each step, ΔR2

and individual beta values were examined to determine whether the IT variables contributed significantly to risk outcome prediction.