Talk:Denial and minimization in sex offenders

Obscure language

This article is way too difficult to apprehend. What do these phrases even mean:

• Greater endorsement of cognitive distortions
• a dichotomous variable reflecting denial and minimization
• actuarial risk

__meco (talk) 17:50, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

• "Greater endorsement" means they asked you questions and you gave answers that indicated you have cognitive distortions. An example would be that if you answered "yes" to a bunch of these questions, that would be "greater endorsement of cognitive distortions" than if you answered no to all of them.
• "A dichotomous variable" means it can be either present or not present. I.e. you're either denying and minimizing, or you're not.
• "Actuarial risk" means that factors are present that statistically are associated with risk of offending. E.g., if you're young, that increases your actuarial risk.

Lysander (talk) 18:44, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

And readers shouldn't have to go to the talk page in order to understand what the article says. Plainly, the language needs to be simplified! Remove all the unecessarily abstruse language. BTW, this is a well-known ploy to make sensitive information apprehensible only to academics. __meco (talk) 18:58, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

I didn't know about that ploy. Lysander (talk) 22:39, 25 November 2015 (UTC)