The article entitled Does IQ Moderate the Relation between Psychopathy and Juvenile Offending? is a paper that studies 1,354 juvenile offenders in both Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Phoenix, Arizona. The main objective of this paper was to study the interaction between intelligence and psychopathy in predicting the rate of offending. The motivation behind this hypothesis was based on various things; the first being two papers that studied the aspects of psychopathy predicting offending among teenage offenders. The first paper studied 100 male adolescents who were detained. They found that boys who were higher on callous-emotional traits as well having higher verbal ability scores had the greatest amount of violent criminal behavior. The second…show more content… The authors wanted to prove that psychopathy and intelligence independently predicted both types of offending (aggressive and income), based on the research that low intelligence and high psychopathy are variables that can independently predict offending. The authors are interested to prove this because they want to examine the roles of both variables, intelligence and psychopathy, in different types of offending in order to understand what sorts of conditions predicts teenagers’ future offending. The authors predicted that both psychopathy and intelligence would independently predict aggression and income offending. Lastly, the results that would prove their hypothesis incorrect would be one that showed that intelligence and psychopathy did not predicted a higher rate of offending but instead a lower rate since intelligence could be a protective factor in delinquency. The study was conducted by assessing 1,354 serious juvenile offenders in Philadelphia, PA and Phoenix, AZ between the ages of 14-17 enrolled in a program called Pathways to Desistance. In the first interview, the participants’ information was obtained through a computer-assisted interview. They were assessed on their intelligence, psychopathy, and self-reported offending in the initial interview and then later on in follow up interviews at 36 months and…show more content… They connect their study with other research, mentioning that this study does expand upon earlier work such as with Gretton et al. and Kosson et al. The authors do explain well, mentioning that their study highlights IQ as a moderator between the relationships of psychopathy and offending which can be used as an example of how multiple variables can increase the likelihood of antisocial activity. They also mention their limitations in their study, such as the limit of generalization of the findings. The results are consistent among adolescent offenders, not among other kind of populations. Additionally, the sample used was diverse in race and ethnicity so would be difficult to determine any relationship between offending and race/ethnicity. Lastly, offending was also measured by self-reporting rather than by an official report so results could be differ when predicting offending. A limitation to the study I personally found was that the authors having multiple hypotheses listed. It would make it difficult to pinpoint what is exactly what they are looking for. It should be combined into one or two hypothesis. Additionally, I found that the authors did not operationalized the two types of offending they described; income and aggressive. Though one, can assume what an income offending is and what an aggressive offending is, it would be best to operationalized these definitions. Lastly, the way they
