CPS Professor and Alumnus Publish In Leading Criminal Justice Journal

Center for Psychological Studies alumnus USAF Major Monty Baker (Ph.D. ‘02) recently completed his second Iraq deployment. His dissertation project has been accepted for publication in Criminal Justice and Behavior, a premier criminal justice journal. Major Baker is currently stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and will return to campus to present to CPS students in February.

The article, published with CPS professor Vincent Van Hasselt, Ph.D., and the late Alfred Sellers Ph.D, who was an assistant professor with CPS, is entitled “Validation of the Novaco Anger Scale.” The scale was used with an incarcerated offender population. The work will appear in Criminal Justice and Behavior.

The abstract is below:

Many attempts have been made to construct measures that assess different aspects of anger. The Novaco Anger Scale (NAS) was developed to assess anger and predict violent behavior. Validity research on the NAS to date has yielded promising results. However, few studies have examined the NAS among incarcerated offenders. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to: (1) examine the psychometric properties of the NAS in a sample of male and female incarcerated adults; (2) investigate the relationship between the NAS and self-report measures of anger, social desirability, and personality; and (3) evaluate the factor dimensions of the NAS using confirmatory factor-analytic procedures. Participants were adult male and female offenders incarcerated in “Program Units” of three large county jail facilities in Southeastern Florida. Results indicated that the theoretically-derived scales of the NAS demonstrated both reliability and validity in these groups of offenders. Further, the correlations between the NAS and anger measures were significant. Based on confirmatory factor analyses, the two-factor oblique model was supported, and all NAS subscales loaded significantly on their designated factors.