The Inventory of Legal Knowledge (ILK) and adults with intellectual disabilities

Journal of Intellectual Disabilities and Offending Behaviour,Volume 8, Issue 2, June 2017. Purpose Adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) entering the legal system in the United States are at heightened risk of being incorrectly labeled as malingering. The Inventory of Legal Knowledge (ILK) was recently developed to assess response style of individuals undergoing competency to stand trial evaluations. This paper presents preliminary data on the utility of the ILK with adults with ID. Design/methodology/approach Thirty-two adults were recruited from an American day program for adults with ID. Using a simulation design, the first twenty-four participants were assigned to the honest responding group and the remaining eight were assigned to the fake bad group. The normative performance of the honest responding group was compared to established norms for adults without ID, the most efficient ILK cut-off score was examined, and convergent validity of the ILK and other malingering measures tested. Findings Compared to the established mean score, the recommended cut-off score, and two independent published samples of non-ID adults, the normative performance of the honest responding ID group was significantly lower. Analyses of area under the curve (AUC) revealed that the ILK lacked sufficient ability to discriminate adults with ID instructed to respond honestly from those instructed to feign incompetence, and correlational analyses failed to support the convergent validity of ...
Source: Journal of Intellectual Disabilities and Offending Behaviour - Category: Criminology Source Type: research