A Systematic Review Exploring the Quality and Effectiveness of Tools Currently Utilized to Measure Attitudes Toward Prisoner Populations: Exploring Reliability and Validity

ABSTRACTIt has been suggested that attitudes toward offender populations can impact upon a range of factors associated with prisoner care, reform, and rehabilitation. This study aims to systematically review the instruments developed and utilized to explore attitudes toward incarcerated offender populations in terms of their focus and psychometric properties. The ultimate aim is to highlight clinical practice implications associated with this area. Seven electronic databases and reference lists of relevant publications were searched. Inclusion criteria were applied to the identified publications. Included studies were quality assessed by two independent assessors using predefined quality assessment criteria prior to data extraction. Emphasis was placed upon measures of internal structure, reliability (internal consistency, test–retest and split-half) and validity (construct; convergent and divergent, and content). An electronic search yielded 534 hits. Of these, 483 were irrelevant, and 15 duplicate publi...