Case formulation with offenders: What, who, where, when, why and how?

Abstract

This editorial provides an overview of the current issue of Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health. Articles aim to explore the concept of case formulation, the nature and quality of systemised approaches to it and to consider evidence on its effectiveness. Formulation is not a new concept. In clinical psychology, it was born out of the evolution of the scientist-practitioner model in the 1950s. In this, clinical psychologists apply scientific methods to understand people’s problems and generate hypotheses about what might bring about change in them. Moore and Drennan develop the concept by exploring the practical realities for clinicians in making and using formulation with the sort of complex cases typified by offenders with personality disorder, whether applying the process in health services or other settings. They highlight, among other benefits, the resulting potential for anticipating and managing adverse outcomes and linking steps along the pathway. Haque and Webster offer a complementary approach, showing how highly formal processes of structured professional judgment, according to reliable and valid schemes, can also be part of the family of formulations. Both these introductions show awareness of the centrality of risk assessment and management to the formulation process. Minoudis and colleagues provide data on the reliability and internal consistency of a new checklist to support formulation, which may be particularly helpful to this group, and then use it to evaluate training in the technique. Their finding in respect of a training programme of good face validity is important. Brown and Völlm investigate probation staff views on formulation, identifying both barriers to implementation and the positive aspects of this collaborative approach with offenders. Mappin et al. use multiple sequential functional analyses to bring structure to formulation when intimate partner violence is the presenting problem. Davies et al. conclude by helping us towards a framework for evaluation, considering the sort of variation between cases and circumstances in which formulation may be useful, challenge our dependence only on the easily researched questions and emphasise something that we think comes through as one of the most important themes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)