Introduction With an increase in school shootings, such as the 1999 Columbine shootings and the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, it has become more important for educators, police and mental health professionals. This article reviews the literature on threat assessment in schools, primarily focusing on elementary and secondary schools. Safe Schools Initiative The Safe Schools Initiative “examined…
Tag: forecasting
Basic Homicide Risk Assessment
Introduction to Homicide Risk Assessment All mental health professionals in the US and Canada have an ethical duty to warn, the requirement to warn someone who is at risk of harm of that harm. This leads clinicians to conduct homicide risk assessments to determine the level of danger to others. In therapy or crisis intervention, the clinician is…
Predicting Your Helpline Call Answer Rate
One role of helpline managers is to manage their workers so that they can answer the most calls possible within the available resources. Even helplines that run 24-hours and have 100% coverage can’t answer 100% of the calls that come in if they have more callers calling in than workers available. Using a system like Chronicall…
Least-Squares Regression
Regression is a technique used to predict future values based on known values. For instance, linear regression allows us to predict what an unknown Y value will be, given a series of known X and Y’s, and a given X value. Given the following, it’s easy to see the pattern. But assuming no obvious pattern…
Delphi Technique
Introduction There are a number of techniques for making predictions or analysis. It is particularly useful in governments, public policy, and other areas where facts may be disputed but generally based on a set of common foundational knowledge. Examples of this type include economics (where the same economic principles may be expressed differently by country),…