Impact of procedural factors on perceived justice in divorce settlements

We used a decision-making conceptual framework from family resource management combined with procedural justice frameworks from social psychology to (i) articulate the elements and rules of procedural fairness, (ii) develop a theoretical organization and code to include procedural fairness principles as applied to legal decision processes in divorce, and (iii) describe the perceptions of divorcing parties about the violations of procedural fairness principles in their own divorce process. Procedural fairness principles included accuracy, consistency, ethicality, bias suppression, correctability, and representativeness. Results of qualitative data analyses were consistent with experimental studies in that divorced people were concerned with fair procedures and particularly with violations of the principles of ethicality, consistency, accuracy, and representativeness.