an examination of the factor structure of the psychopathy checklist

2 Method
2.1 Sample
The current sample was composed of female adolescents referred to Youth
Forensic Psychiatric Services (YFPS) in British Columbia. YFPS provides assessment
and treatment services to justice-involved youth, aged 12-17 at the time of their offence.
Assessments are conducted by a multidisciplinary team, including, psychologists,
psychiatrists, psychiatric social workers, and psychiatric nurses. Under Tri-Council
guidelines, permission for file review was granted by the Behavioural Research Ethics
Board of the University of British Columbia, the Program Evaluation and Research
(PER) Ethics Board of YFPS (see Appendix C), and by the Senior Executive Director,
Provincial Services, Ministry of Children and Family Development (see Appendix D). As
part of the assessment process at YFPS, youths provided consent to allow their
information to be used for any and all research projects approved by the PER Ethics
Board. As a result of subsequent approvals, available closed files of female youth with a
history of violent offending were reviewed.
The YFPS PER department identified a large number of female youth files from
two previous studies conducted by the PER department and a third study which they
are currently conducting. The final sample consisted of 145 female youth offenders who
were between the ages of 12 to 18 at the time of their index offense (M = 15.5, SD =
1.3). The vast majority of files were quite detailed and included information from a
variety of sources including police records (e.g., previous charges and convictions,
police circumstances, detailed narratives, witness and offender statements), court
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