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Measuring the Accessibility and Equality of Civil Justice

Pleasence, PT; Balmer, NJ; (2018) Measuring the Accessibility and Equality of Civil Justice. Hague Journal on the Rule of Law , 10 (2) pp. 255-294. 10.1007/s40803-018-0079-0. Green open access

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Abstract

While, in the United Kingdom, attitudes to the criminal justice system have been routinely investigated less effort has been made to measure attitudes to the civil justice system. However, globally, there are increasingly numerous examples of studies of attitudes to civil justice. Robust standardised scales are important to establishing change and difference between groups; for example, in the context of United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16.3. Past focus has been on developing ‘composite indicators’. This paper sees the application of modern psychometric methods to the construction of ‘reflective’ instruments to measure single unidimensional attitude dimensions. Drawing on relevant theoretical frameworks, we administered an item pool of 35 attitude questions to a sample of 1,061 adults across England and Wales. Principal component analysis was used to identify attitude domains, followed by Rasch analysis to construct scales with acceptable psychometric properties. An Inaccessibility of Justice (IOJ) scale and a Perceived Inequality of Justice (PIJ) scale resulted. Respondents who regarded themselves as having handled past civil legal problems poorly or having experienced unfair outcomes had higher IOJ and PIJ scores. Negative accounts of lawyers or courts from others were also associated with higher scores. Our substantive findings help explain how negative experiences of problem resolution can result in ‘frustrated resignation’ for later problems, and show the importance of positive experiences and accounts of the justice system in maintaining public support. The scales have broad justice policy utility and the methods provide a template for future related scale development.

Type: Article
Title: Measuring the Accessibility and Equality of Civil Justice
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s40803-018-0079-0
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40803-018-0079-0
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s) 2018. Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: Access to Justice, Equality of Justice, Civil Justice System, Attitudes, Measurement
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Laws
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10052108
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