extended · article · 2018

Measuring the Accessibility and Equality of Civil Justice

Pascoe Pleasence; Nigel J. Balmer; George Engelhard Jr.

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 ...