Overview
This two-day online workshop will focus on the comprehensive assessment of personality through a combination of psychometric assessment and clinical interview and the relevance of observations to the assessment of insider risk.
The workshop will begin with a review of key issues in personality and insider risk. Key issues will include the nature of both personality and insider risk and their putative links, personality traits relevant to insider risk, and the relationships between personality and other risk and resilience factors in sensitive work settings. Three detailed case studies relating to insider risk scenarios will be introduced, which will be drawn on throughout the remainder of the training.
The next part of the workshop will examine the assessment of personality. Different options for assessment (e.g., self-report, unstructured, structured and semi-structured clinical interviews, structured observations by others, etc) will be examined to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, how they may usefully be combined, and the limitations of relying on any single or specific combination of approaches. Examples of each will be discussed to illustrate notable points. The practicalities of assessing personality in the context of a wider assessment of risk will then be explored.
Differentiating personality traits from conditions that may present superficially in similar ways will then be considered. This is an essential topic of discussion. The case studies will be used to illustrate a set of guiding principles for determining the basis for deciding what condition takes precedence and why – and managing the difficulty of being unable to be sure, despite the rigour of the assessment methods used, on a final determination of risk.
By far the most effective way of assessing personality is via clinical interview. Therefore, the remainder of the course will focus on interviewing skills and their application through several different semi-structured interview formats. The organisation of such an interview and a discussion with the client about their personality characteristics in relation to insider risk potential will be examined in detail. The case studies will be relied on once again to aid advanced reflections on practice.
This course is intended for qualified practitioners working in – or with or on behalf of – organisations that make significant demands of their employees, practitioners whose job it is to understand as much about the resilience of employees as their potential vulnerabilities, and who are dedicated to the use of psychometric assessments as an adjunct to advanced clinical skills to do so in practical, informative and sensitive ways.
Learning Outcomes
- To provide attendees with a basis for determining the strengths and weaknesses of different psychometric methods in the context of an insider risk assessment, and a set of strategies for managing any assessment limitations that may arise in individual cases
- To support attendees to develop their clinical interviewing skills to supplement their assessment practice
- To provide suggestions for how attendees can improve the clarity and precision of their communications about personality and its potential as an insider risk factor in sensitive occupational settings
Presenter(s)
Dr. Caroline Logan
About the presenter(s)
Dr Caroline Logan is a Consultant Forensic Clinical Psychologist. She has worked as a lead consultant in high and medium secure forensic mental health services in the north of England, and as a consultant/contractor with law enforcement and threat assessment and management agencies in the UK and elsewhere for almost 30 years. She is also an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Manchester (from 2009, and before that, a senior research fellow then an honorary research fellow at the University of Liverpool between 1996-2009) and a scientist at the Kompetansesenter at Helse Bergen in Norway. Dr Logan has ongoing clinical and research interests in personality disorder and psychopathy, mental disorder and comorbidity, risk and threat assessment and management, violent extremism, and forensic clinical interviewing, and she has a special interest in gender issues in the range of offending and harmful behaviour. She has published five books and over 80 articles on these subjects, including Violent Extremism: A Handbook of Risk Assessment and Management, a book co-edited with Randy Borum and Paul Gill, published in November 2023, and a second edition of Managing Clinical Risk: A Guide to Effective Practice, co-edited with Lorraine Johnstone, published in December 2023. She has commenced work on a new book on violent extremism in youth with Professors Borum and Gill, and a book on personality problems and risk is in the pipeline.
Notes
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