Procedural Justice in Resolving Family Conflict: Implications for Youth Violence Prevention

The fairness of our legal system is often judged by individuals and the public at large along dimensions of procedural and distributive justice. People seem to care about how legal decisions are made as well as about the specific outcomes reached by juries and judges. In fact, perceptions of procedural and distributive justice or injustice may influence public perceptions and confidence in the legitimacy of our legal system. This paper focuses mainly on procedural justice. Using an ecological framework, we tested the hypothesis that older adolescents use the same or similar criteria for evaluating fairness in the context of family decision making that people in general use to evaluate the fairness of legal processes and decisions. We also tested the hypothesis that family decision-making procedures that are perceived to be unfair contribute to increased risk for acting out and deviant behavior among older adolescents. Principal components analysis confirmed that older adolescents use several distinct criteria for evaluating procedural fairness in the family context and that these criteria are comparable to those that people use to evaluate the fairness of legal procedures (rational and objective treatment conveying personal respect, consistent and non-discriminatory treatment reflecting social status or standing, and instrumental participation or having "an opportunity to be heard"). Hierarchical multiple regression analysis confirmed that procedural justice factors are associated with adolescent deviant behavior. We discuss implications for adolescent deviance and youth violence prevention.     

Cross-border crime and legal jurisdiction in post-colonial Hong Kong

Decolonization should be viewed as a process that both precedes and follows a change of sovereignty rather than as a discrete, historic event. Seen in this light, decolonization is now well advanced in Hong Kong. One of the major institutions engaged in this process is the Hong Kong legal system. In this paper I analyze the constitutional arrangements for Hong Kong's post-colonial legal system; describe Hong Kong's most sensational cross-border criminal case of the 1990s; and evaluate Hong Kong's prospects for retaining a separate legal system under Chinese sovereignty. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Undergraduate Education in Legal Psychology

The purpose of this article is to describe ways that legal psychology can be introduced into the undergraduate curriculum. The extent to which undergraduate psychology and law courses are currently a part of the curriculum is described, and a model is proposed for coursework in a Psychology Department that might adequately reflect coverage of the legal area. The role of legal psychology in interdisciplinary programs and Criminal Justice departments is discussed. Sources for teaching aids and curricular materials are described.     

Parsing Protection and Risk for Problem Behavior Versus Pro-social Behavior Among US and Chinese Adolescents

This study investigates the different roles played by protective factors and risk factors—and by particular protective and risk factors—when the concern is with accounting for adolescent problem behavior than when the concern is with accounting for adolescent pro-social behavior. The protective and risk factor literature on adolescent problem behavior reveals considerable conceptual and operational ambiguity; an aim of the present study was to advance understanding in this domain of inquiry by providing a systematic conceptualization of protection and risk and of their measurement. Within the systematic framework of Problem Behavior Theory, four protective and four risk factors are assessed in a cross-national study of both problem behavior and pro-social behavior involving large adolescent samples in China (N = 1,368) and the US (N = 1,087), in grades 9, 10, and 11; females 56 %, US; 50 %, China. The findings reveal quite different roles for protection and risk, and for particular protective and risk factors, when the outcome criterion is problem behavior than when it is pro-social behavior. The protective factor, Controls Protection, which engages rule and regulations and sanctions in the adolescent’s ecology, emerges as most important in influencing problem behavior, but it plays a relatively minor role in relationship to pro-social behavior. By contrast, Models Protection, the presence of pro-social models in the adolescent’s ecology, and Support Protection, the presence of interest and care in that same ecology, have no significant relationship to problem behavior variation, but they are both the major predictors of variation in pro-social behavior. The findings are robust across the samples from the two very diverse societies. These results suggest that greater attention be given to protection in problem behavior research and that a more nuanced perspective is needed about the roles that particular protective and risk factors play in reducing problem behavior and in promoting pro-social behavior.     

When men fight with women (versus other men): Limited offending during disputes

What transpires in a dispute, even a violent dispute, is affected by the tendency for adversaries to engage in “limited offending.” We focus on one restraint: the tendency of men to limit their aggression in their disputes with women. Analyses are based on an incident-level survey about interpersonal disputes administered to 503 men who are incarcerated and 220 men who had never been incarcerated. Using multinomial and logistic regression models, we examined the extent to which an adversary's gender predicted dispute-related behaviors. The evidence suggests that the chivalry norm has pervasive effects on the behavior of men during their disputes with women. Men are more likely to engage in remedial actions (e.g., apologies) when their adversary is a woman, as opposed to another man. In addition, men are less likely to make violent threats and engage in physical attacks when their adversary is a woman, even after they have themselves been physically attacked. When men are violent, they are less likely to injure a woman than a man. However, the chivalry norm does not inhibit verbal aggression in these disputes: men are just as likely to engage in verbal attacks and nonviolent threats when the adversary is a woman.