An Examination of Current Psychometric Assessments of Child Molesters’ Offense-Supportive Beliefs Using Ward’s Implicit Theories

Are current questionnaire methods fit for the task of assessing offense-related schemas? Six published and unpublished questionnaire measures that assess child molesters’ offense-related beliefs are evaluated and examined for evidence of the five implicit schemas proposed by Ward: children as sexual beings, nature of harm, uncontrollabil-ity, entitlement, and dangerous world. Current treatment approaches assume that child molesters hold some, if not all, of these implicit schemas—an assumption demon-strated through the use of appropriately modified schema-based treatment techniques. Coding the six questionnaires revealed that nonsexual offense-specific implicit theories are underrepresented on existing measures (i.e., uncontrollability, entitlement, and dan-gerous world) and that many questionnaire items could not be classified as tapping any implicit theories. Suggestions are made for the future design and revision of question-naire assessments