NCJ Number
90425
Date Published
1983
Length
150 pages
Annotation
This volume describes the collection and archiving of the data base for the Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP), as well as the overall theoretical perspectives used in its design, collection, and analysis.
Abstract
The CLRP was funded under the Federal Justice Research Program because of a recognized need for civil justice planning data, the need for theory to guide court reform, the need for empirical studies of civil litigation and other forums for handling civil disputes, and the need to examine the role of costs in civil litigation. The research design chose as the dependent variables decisions made by the actors in the process, principally the disputants and their attorneys. A behavioral approach was used to generate hypotheses about the reasons different disputants make different types of dispute decisions, using independent variables that included legal, institutional, economic, social, and psychological factors. Then, data were gathered on several thousand disputes from varied sources. The decision to focus on disputes or cases as the unit of analysis shaped specific research design decisions. The household screening survey provided baseline data on the incidence of grievances and disputes among households, as well as data for analysis of factors related to the transformation of grievances into disputes. The individual and organizational disputant and government lawyer surveys were designed to assess the way disputants choose among various techniques for dealing with disputes. The data archive consists of three data files, two files from the screening surveys, and one large disputes file. Some lessons for the civil justice research field to be learned from the CLRP are discussed in the final chapter. Eleven notes and 75 references are provided. For other volumes of the final report, see NCJ 90435-36.