Formation of procedural beliefs about legal arenas: Do people generalize from loosely related past legal experiences?

Few studies have addressed how people develop beliefs about legal authorities' neutrality and fairness. Using a cross-sectional survey of taxpayers (N = 147), this study examines the sources and processes underlying the formation of these beliefs. Controlling for significant contributions of media stories about audits and past audit experiences, past loosely related negative legal events (traffic court) also shape perceptions that tax auditors are more biased and unfair. Information about police officers exchanged in conversations also creates perceptions that tax auditors are more biased. These generalization effects occur only when people do not have prior direct experience with tax auditors. For taxpayers with prior audit experience, positive experiences are related to more positive perceptions of auditors and media stories about tax audits produce more negative perceptions. The findings suggest that positive and negative past experiences shape beliefs only when they disconfirm prior perceptions based on imagination or indirect sources. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Film Reviews

Relying on experimental methodology, we find that positive and negative reports of specific aspects of the economy influence the audience's assessments of political responsibility for the state of the economy. In addition, whether the president actively attempts to take credit (in the case of positive economic news) or attempts to avoid blame (in the case of negative economic news) also influences assessments. Finally, we find that effects are largely dependent on individual levels of partisanship.     

Is referendum voting distinctive? Evidence from three UK cases

The study of referendum voting follows much the same format as for general election voting. Influences on vote, however, are likely to differ significantly. Referendums decide issues, while general elections determine which party or parties will form the government. Parties are often divided on referendum issues and these issues tend to be of low salience. General elections, however, are contested by long-established parties on highly salient issues. Using panel data from the British Election Study and the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum Study, we find that voters place different weights on party identification, issue positions, government and leader evaluations when voting in general elections and referendums, but the evidence for differential campaign effects is limited.     

Criminal Court-Ordered Psychiatric Evaluations:Does Gender Play a Role?

This study examines potential gender differences among defendants referred by criminal courts for psychiatric evaluations by analyzing demographic, clinical, and criminal history variables and evaluation findings. This study offers a large sample size of 718 females, as well as 3,627 males. Bivariate logistic regression and heterogeneity analyses were utilized to assess potential differences. Females were older; diagnosed more with mood, anxiety, and borderline personality disorders; less likely to have prior felony convictions; and more likely to be in the community than jail at the time of the evaluation. In addition, when controlling for other factors, females were more likely to be evaluated as having a mental disease or defect, to need hospitalization pending trial, and to be incompetent to stand trial.     

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF REFERRAL ISSUES AND “ULTIMATE ISSUE” RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PARENTS IN CHILD PROTECTION CASES*

Mental health professionals frequently respond to requests for clinical information on parents in child protection cases; however, little data exist on the issues precipitating requests or on the controversial practice of offering “ultimate issue” recommendations in forensic clinical reports. We investigated 243 requests for clinical information on parents and 204 clinician reports submitted for use in child abuse and neglect proceedings in a large, urban juvenile court system. We coded 56 objective and qualitative characteristics regarding referral questions, pending legal issues, and four levels of recommendations. We found that the most common referral questions related to service planning, parenting ability, and/or parents' mental health functioning, and the most common pending legal issues were selection or change of a permanency goal and visitation arrangements. Levels of recommendations varied with type of legal decision, in that clinicians always offered direct recommendations for narrow, statute‐based issues (e.g., termination of rights, adoption) and less so for other issues. Community‐based evaluators were more likely to offer direct recommendations than court‐based clinicians. Based on the findings, we offer practice recommendations and directions for further research in forensic parenting assessment.     

CONSULTANT CONDUCT IN ANTICIPATION OF A CHILD CUSTODY EVALUATION: ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DILEMMAS AND THE NEED FOR NEUTRAL PARENT EDUCATION

Mental health professionals are being retained with increasing frequency as “custody consultants” to prepare a parent for a child custody evaluation. While this practice may serve a legitimate function, no ethical guidelines clearly govern the conduct of a consultant in such circumstances. This lack of guidance has led to professional disagreement regarding the ethical implications of the practice. This ethical ambiguity is accompanied by social concern regarding the high cost of custody consulting, which has the practical effect of denying consulting services to low‐income or self‐represented litigants. This Note will describe the growing practice of custody consulting and the ethical and social unease currently associated with the practice. This Note will then propose that mandatory parent education programs be developed for parents preparing to undergo a custody evaluation. This type of educational program would provide many of the benefits of custody consulting in an ethically neutral fashion and would ensure that all parents have access to the benefits of this growing practice.     

The red herring of adolescent mental health

An increase in adolescent distress and mental health symptoms has been clearly documented since the COVID-19 pandemic, as has increased exposure to adverse childhood experiences. Layer on top of these stressors being a youth of divorcing or separating high conflict families, and adolescent symptomatology can suddenly become a flashpoint for parental attention, division and conflict. Approaching cases using an ecological and family systems framework is necessary for accurate conceptualization and assessment of best interests in the context of child custody evaluations. Doing so ensures that adolescent mental health does not become a red herring in high conflict cases, leading to undue focus on the adolescent's mental health without considering other salient factors in the case, such as the broader parent conflict. Programs offered at the Center of Excellence for Children, Families & the Law at William James College designed to improve the lives of youth by addressing parental conflict are described.     

“To develop and test:” The inventive difference between evaluation and experimentation

The National Research Council (NRC) Report on Improving Evaluation of Anticrime Programs raises a fundamental question about the mission of evaluation research. The implicit premise of the report is that the mission of evaluation is to answer questions about programs developed by others; in short, to test anti-crime programs. In contrast, the mission of experimental criminology has, historically, been to develop anti-crime programs as well as to test them. There are times when an arm’s-length relationship between program and evaluation may be appropriate. Yet, such a separation necessarily produces a courtroom-like adjudication role for evaluators, rather than the laboratory-like, participant–inventor role that has characterized the best of experimental criminology. The recent case of the Chicago police’s “evaluating” the use of sequential suspect identification methods developed by academic psychologists shows the many flaws of the “testing-only” model. This suggests that providing “effective guidance of criminal justice policy and practice,” as the NRC report defines its focus [Lipsey, M. ed (2005). http://newton.nap.edu/pdf/0309097061/pdf_image/R1.pdf] will not only require evaluation research (defined as arm’s-length testing) but the full toolbox of experimental criminology to develop and test anti-crime programs.

PTV gap: A new measure of party identification yielding monotonic partisan attitudes and supporting comparative analysis

Despite the cornerstone role of party identification for analyzing voting behavior in the United States, its measurement (in terms of the classic American National Electoral Studies – ANES – seven-point scale) is affected by a systematic problem of non-monotonicity, and it proved impossible to be directly applied outside the United States. We introduce a novel, complementary measurement approach aimed at addressing both problems. We test on US data (an expressly collected computer-assisted web interviewing survey dataset) a new, seven-point scale of partisanship constructed from PTV (propensity-to-vote) items, acting as projective devices for capturing partisan preferences, and routinely employed in multi-party systems. We show that a PTV-based (suitable for comparative analysis) seven-point scale of partisanship outperforms the classic ANES scale. Groups identified by the new scale show monotonic partisan attitudes, and the comparison of multivariate models of political attitudes testify significantly larger effects for the new scale, as well as an equal or higher predictive ability on a range of political attitudes.     

Public opinion during a presidential campaign: Distinguishing the effects of environmental evolution and attitude change

This paper develops a spatial model which distinguishes between different sources of temporal variability in public opinion over the course of an election campaign. Candidates and citizens are shown as points within a space. The candidate points are fixed, but their relative positions can change as a result of change over time in the dimension weights. If this occurs, it represents environmental evolution. The individual citizens' points also can move within the space, independently of the external environment. To the extent this occurs, it represents attitude change. The model is tested with data from the CPS 1980 National Election Study. The empirical results show that much of the variability in public evaluations of the candidates is due to evolutionary changes in the electoral environment, rather than individual-level attitude changes. Furthermore, that attitudinal change which does occur is strongly delimited by factors like partisan strength, interest in the campaign, and political participation.