NCJ Number
72557
Journal
Sociological Review Volume: 25 Issue: 1 Dated: (1977) Pages: 131-145
Date Published
1977
Length
15 pages
Annotation
Transcripts from juvenile court hearings in 1972 and 1973 in England were linguistically analyzed to discover the quality of communication between the court and its clients (specifically the child and the child's parents).
Abstract
The study sought to discover to what extent the differential use of linguistic codes affect the quality of communication between court and client. The shorthand writer collecting the information for the study sat at the rear of the courtroom to be inconspicuous, but this caused hearing to be difficult at times. The analyses concentrated on four of the participants of the juvenile courts: the magistrates, the clerks, the children, and the parents or other family. Basic analysis was carried out on a computer using a text-sorting program. One-way analysis of variance was also used to test the statistical significance of the results. The data showed that the middle-class clerks and magistrates used significantly more complex verbal structures than did the largely working-class children and their families. The children and their families contributed a very small proportion off the total utterances in the hearings, thereby conveying only a limited amount of information, even allowing for the full range of nonverbal communication. The court is therefore not receiving the information from the child that is required by statute. The passing of information from child to court, where it does occur, is on a very simple level. Finally, the communication of values and information from court to child is done in a grammatically complex manner, with long contorted sentences, putting a considerable load on the child's information processing capacity. Thus, these results document a quantitative difference in linguistic characteristics of juvenile court hearing participants. Several tables and 19 references are provided.