extended · article · 2019

Development of a General Legal Confidence Scale: A First Implementation of the Rasch Measurement Model in Empirical Legal Studies

Pascoe Pleasence; Nigel J. Balmer; John M. Linacre

Legal capability has long been of evident importance in our understanding of legal problem resolution behavior. Although legal capability remains a contested concept, there is much commonality between specifications. Some aspects are generic, while others—such as legal confidence—are particular to law. Such law‐specific measures as have been developed to date have been developed in an ad‐hoc fashion; with no attempts made to test psychometric properties, using either classical test theory or modern psychometric methods. This has been a shortcoming in the empirical legal field, weakening theoretical development and precluding reliable estimation of changes in levels of legal capability over time. In this article, we set out details of a study aimed at introducing new methods to scale development in the field of empirical legal studies based on the approaches that have evolved in other fie...