Summary. Investigation agencies working to improve the response to child crime victims, such as Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs), often want to assess client satisfaction with the investigation process but there is little understanding of the construct and no reliable and valid measures are available. The goal of this project is to develop and test a measure of client satisfaction with investigations of crimes against children for use with children and non-offending caregivers. The specific measures that we are testing are the Investigation Satisfaction Scale for Children (ISS-C) and the Investigation Satisfaction Scale for Parents (ISS-P). Our aim is to establish measures that are psychometrically sound and promote their use by law enforcement and other investigators in evaluations and quality reviews.
Goals and Objectives
The specific objectives are to:
- Revise and refine the ISS-P and ISS-C measures, ensuring adequate scale structure and content validity and pilot the revised measures
- Test the measures using large samples (300+) of reported child victims and non-offending parents from several sites around the U.S.
- Evaluate the factor structure of the measures; determine their internal and test-retest reliability, and assess their construct validity.
- Standardize results, disseminate the scales, and encourage use of the developed measures as quality indicators for law enforcement and other investigation professionals.
