The Danger Assessment

TLDR

The Danger Assessment is a tool designed to gauge the likelihood of lethal or near‑lethal outcomes in intimate partner violence cases. This study reports the development, psychometric validation, and practical recommendations for using the Danger Assessment. An 11‑city case–control analysis of 310 femicide victims versus 324 abused women used multivariate modeling to refine the instrument, adding four items, splitting one, and recalibrating item weights into a risk‑scoring algorithm. The revised risk levels achieved a 0.90 area under the ROC curve when evaluated on an independent sample of 194 attempted femicides.

Abstract

The Danger Assessment (DA) is an instrument designed to assess the likelihood of lethality or near lethality occurring in a case of intimate partner violence. This article describes the development, psychometric validation, and suggestions for use of the DA. An 11-city study of intimate partner femicide used multivariate analysis to test the predictive validity of the risk factors on the DA from intimate partner femicide cases ( N = 310) compared with 324 abused women in the same cities (controls). The results were used to revise the DA (four items added; one “double-barreled” item divided into two), and the calculated weights (adjusted odds ratios) used to develop a scoring algorithm with levels of risk. These levels of risk were then tested with an independent sample of attempted femicides ( N = 194) with a final outcome of .90 of the cases included in the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.