Overview

The MIDSA is a comprehensive inventory that covers well or moderately 21 of ATSA’s 27 Practice Standards and Guidelines for assessing those who have sexually offended. The report is a rich source of information about a client.

The clinical report includes a guide for using the results to guide the creation of treatment plans for trauma-informed treatment, positive therapy, and Andrews and Bonta’s Risk-Needs-Responsivity (RNR) treatment. 

The MIDSA report includes the risk domains that have been found to be associated with sexual recidivism and in the RNR approach are the focus of treatment and dispositional decisions. The most widely used dynamic risk assessment tools, such as the STABLE-2007, VRS-SO, and SRA-FV, all assess these domains. For adult males the MIDSA report includes a self-report version of the SRA.

The report includes results in narrative and table format as well as empirically validate scales. These scales are created by averaging clients’s answers to a number of questions. The MIDSA self-report scales all have been found valid in empirical research (see the Clinical Manual and Annotated Bibliography). Most scales compare clients’ answers to those of a community sample and to incarcerated (adult) or residential (juvenile) males who have sexually offended. Some scales use university student sample in place of the community sample. We do not have norms for females, so they are compared to the same male samples as male clients.

To situate your clients’ answers within the two comparison groups (community and males who have sexually offended), MIDSA creates a graphic for each scale.  To understand the graphic, see the article Understanding Scale Figures.

To better understand the meaning of the results provided by the MIDSA, we provide articles for the domains covered, including the validity report. Simply choose the articles you need.