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23 Psych., Crime & L. 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/pcyceadl23 and id is 1 raw text is: PSYCHOLOGY, CRIME & LAW, 2017 Rutledge VOL. 23, NO. 1, 1-14 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2016.1217335 Taylor & Francis Group Testing the construct validity of the PICTS proactive and reactive scores against six putative measures of proactive and reactive criminal thinking Glenn D. Waltersa and Erica Yurvatib 'Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA, USA; bDepartment of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This study tested the construct validity of the Psychological Received 4 January 2016 Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS) Proactive (P) and Accepted 4 July 2016 Reactive (R) scores. The layperson version of the PICTS was administered to 277 (65 male, 212 female) undergraduates and KEYWORDS Psychological Inventory of correlated with putative measures of proactive and reactive Criminal Thinking Styles; criminal thinking. The hypothesis that P and the proactive scales construct validity; proactive; would correlate >30 in zero-order correlations and regression reactive equations controlling for R, whereas R and the reactive scales would correlate >30 in zero-order correlations and regression equations controlling for P found support in this study. This corroborates the construct validity of the PICS P and R scores and indicates that self-report measures of moral disengagement and neutralization, on the one hand, and impulsivity and risk taking, on the other hand, may serve as effective proxies for proactive and reactive criminal thinking, respectively. The Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS: Walters, 1995) was orig- inally designed to measure the eight thinking styles in Walters' (1990) lifestyle theory of criminal behavior. A theoretical shift occurred, however, after subsequent factor analytic and item response theory studies revealed that the PICTS displayed a hierarchical latent structure. A superordinate factor - general criminal thinking (GCT) - is situated at the top of the hierarchy, below which are found two higher order criminal thinking dimen- sions - proactive (P: cold and calculated) and reactive (R: hot and impulsive) criminal think- ing - and at the bottom are seven individual criminal thinking styles - mollification, cutoff, entitlement, power orientation, superoptimism, cognitive indolence, and discontinuity (Walters, 2014; Walters, Hagman, & Cohn, 2011). In recent years, the focus of PICTS research has shifted from the lower levels of the hierarchy (thinking styles) to the upper regions (GCT and the higher order dimensions), based on research showing that scores on the PICTS GCT, P, and R scales tend to be more reliable and valid than scores on the PICTS thinking style scales (Walters, 2012). The purpose of the current study was to assess the CONTACT Glenn D. Walters walters@kutztown.edu Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA 19530-0730, USA © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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