Violence Risk Assessment for Youth Using the SAVRY

Join Gina Vincent, PhD, and Ivan Kruh, PhD as they present an on-demand professional training program on Violence Risk Assessment for Youth Using the SAVRY | 15 Hours | 15 CEs.

This training is for clinicians.

The SAVRY Version 2 (Borum, Bartel, & Forth, 2006) assesses risk for violence/aggression, non-violent reoffending, residential aggression, and the dynamic risk and protective factors associated with these acts among adolescents. The SAVRY is a well-validated risk assessment instrument for violence, with evidence of its validity for both girls and boys and across several racial/ethnic groups. 

The program includes a brief overview of research on adolescent offending, developmental issues related to risk, and known dynamic and static risk factors. This is followed by a discussion of the different approaches to decision-making; namely, unstructured clinical judgment, actuarial, and structured professional judgment (SPJ).

The bulk of the program is spent teaching participants how to collect data needed to use the SAVRY, how to rate its items, and how to make final determinations of one’s level of risk. The program also covers the risk-need-responsivity framework and developing clinical formulations for treatment/intervention recommendations. 

This program is designed for clinicians practicing in areas in which assessing a youth’s violence risk or risk for general offending is relevant. In most cases, this will be clinicians who conduct assessments of youth involved in the legal system, in either forensic mental health contexts (i.e., court-based evaluations) or other juvenile justice contexts (e.g., juvenile correctional settings). There may be traditional clinical contexts for which these skills may also be relevant, such as residential treatment settings or psychiatric hospitals.