Abstract
While, in the UK, 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 1061 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.
Highlights
1.1 BackgroundA 2012 UK review of literature on public attitudes to the justice system found that, while attitudes to the police and criminal justice system have been routinely investigated in a reasonably nuanced manner, research into attitudes to the civil justice system “is close to non-existent” (Wilson 2012: 6)
Given that, in some jurisdictions at least, people’s conception of “the criminal and civil justice systems are one and the same” (Greene 2016: 1263), and “if left to define ‘the justice system’ for themselves the public do so in terms of criminal justice” (Stratton and Lowe 2005, p. 5),2 conflation may well result in responses skewed to perceptions of the criminal justice system
Instead, we sought to construct an item pool containing a broad and coherent range of aspects of attitudes, that might provide some indication of multidimensionality and domains, if there are distinct domains that are reflected in attitudes
Summary
1.1 BackgroundA 2012 UK review of literature on public attitudes to the justice system found that, while attitudes to the police and criminal justice system have been routinely investigated in a reasonably nuanced manner, research into attitudes to the civil justice system “is close to non-existent” (Wilson 2012: 6). As Moorhead et al (2008: 2) earlier observed, “the evidence base is dominated by studies either wholly in the criminal sphere or which fail to disaggregate civil and criminal contexts”. The conflation of civil and criminal justice is a matter of some significance. Given that, in some jurisdictions at least, people’s conception of “the criminal and civil justice systems are one and the same” (Greene 2016: 1263), and “if left to define ‘the justice system’ for themselves the public do so in terms of criminal justice” 5), conflation may well result in responses skewed to perceptions of the criminal justice system Given that, in some jurisdictions at least, people’s conception of “the criminal and civil justice systems are one and the same” (Greene 2016: 1263), and “if left to define ‘the justice system’ for themselves the public do so in terms of criminal justice” (Stratton and Lowe 2005, p. 5), conflation may well result in responses skewed to perceptions of the criminal justice system
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