Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, Vol 12(4), Dec 2025, 255-270; doi:10.1037/tam0000239
There is limited research on how intimate partner violence risk assessment translates into practice. The Ontario Domestic Assault Risk Assessment (ODARA) is an actuarial intimate partner violence risk assessment tool used by police in the United States and Canada that informs relative risk (percentile rank) based on data derived from routine policing samples. Ensuring normative samples are up-to-date enhances confidence in the percentile ranks. Recent research suggests that police may score individuals higher on average than the current norms. We examined interrater reliability between police and researchers in routine policing samples and compared their score distributions with each other and with the published percentile norms. We expected poor interrater reliability, and that both police and researchers’ scores would be higher than the published percentile norms. We analyzed ODARA scores from three samples in which police and researchers scored the same or similar cases. We tested interrater reliability using intraclass correlations, Pearson correlations, κs, and percent agreement. We summarized mean differences between police and researchers’ scores using fixed-effect meta-analysis and tested differences in score distributions using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Correlation coefficients showed fair-to-good agreement and yielded similar values. There were only small differences in police and researcher median and mean scores and no substantial difference between the means and distributions of police and researcher scores overall. However, both groups scored cases higher on average than expected from the percentile norms. Updated ODARA norms may be needed and could be based on either police scores or researcher coding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)