LATEST ON JUSTIS
JUSTIS is a project designed to provide EU institutions and Member States with new evidence-based indicators for the assessment of public confidence in criminal justice and the fear of crime. The aim of the project is to develop and pilot survey-based indicators of these issues.
A publication on Work Package 2 materials was edited and published by the Finnish partner HEUNI in September 2009 under the name of JUSTIS Project Working Papers – Review of Need: Indicators of Public Confidence in Criminal Justice for Policy Assessment. The publication is available in electronic format here.
Work Package 3 which aims to provide the theoretical foundations to guide the development of new social indicators will be finalised in October 2009.
The JUSTIS research team has organised sessions in academic conferences to present the project findings and engage in discussion with a wider audience. During summer 2009, sessions were organised at the Stockholm Criminology Symposium in Sweden, at the European Survey Research Association Conference in Poland and in the Conference of the European Society of Criminology in Slovenia, during which also a JUSTIS Steering group meeting was held.
THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL SURVEY
Four JUSTIS partners (London School of Economics, King’s College London, University of Sheffield and HEUNI) together with the Dutch research institute NSCR, have submitted a successful proposal for a module of questions in the fifth sweep of the European Social Survey. The 50-question module is entitled ‘Trust in Justice'.
This is an important development for JUSTIS. It means that in addition to our small-scale pilot work planned for 2010, we shall be able to trial JUSTIS questions in one of the best-quality comparative European surveys. The process of planning the survey questions is well under way, and these will form a sub-set of JUSTIS’s Level 1 and Level 2 survey indicators. The Level 3 ‘contextual variables’ that we are collecting as part of the JUSTIS work programme will also prove a vital importance for analysis of the ESS dataset. The piloting and fieldwork of the ESS will take place in 2010, and the dataset will be publicly available in 2011.
SURVEY QUESTIONS AND COGNITIVE QUESTION TESTING
Parallel to the ESS question design is the work on designing questions to the JUSTIS pilot survey. The questions partly overlap but the JUSTIS pilot survey will include more questions both in quantity and detail than the ESS will. The JUSTIS survey questions will be piloted in the spring of 2010. The countries where the piloting will take place have not yet been finalised, but they will include both Eastern and Western European countries.
Four JUSTIS partners (Bulgaria, Finland, Italy and the United Kingdom) have carried out cognitive interviews as part of the work on designing survey questions. Cognitive interviews are aimed at assessing how respondents understand, make sense of and select pre-coded answers to a series of closed ended survey questions. 21 items and cognitive probes were translated and piloted, and reports were written in each country. The results were used for looking at whether the conceptual map of JUSTIS works in different countries, whether the key concepts were understood in the same way in the four countries and whether there were questions that did not work very well. Based on the findings from the first round of cognitive interviews, a second round of interviews will be carried out in October 2009. The second round of interviews will test some of the ESS questions in the same four countries.
PRESENTATIONS ON JUSTIS
The JUSTIS research team has organised sessions in academic conferences to present the project findings and engage in discussion with a wider audience.
HEUNI organised a session called “JUSTIS – Indicators of confidence in the criminal justice system and the fear of crime” at the Stockholm Criminology Symposium which was held in Stockholm, Sweden between 22 and 24 June 2009.
The UK partners also coordinated a session called “Social Indicators of Trust in Criminal Justice” at the European Survey Research Association Conference in Warsaw, Poland 29 June – 3 July 2009.
Finally, a panel session on JUSTIS was organised at the Conference of the European Society of Criminology in Ljubljana, Slovenia between 9 and 12 September 2009. The partners also had a round table discussion on cognitive and qualitative interviews done in different countries. The presentations from ESC are available here.
Furthermore, Stefano Maffei presented the findings of the project and the first year report to the general public in Parma during the event "Researchers’ night", on 25 September.
CURRENT AND FUTURE ACTIVITIES
The deliverables of Work Package 3 will be finalised in October 2009. The survey-based attitudinal indicators being designed under Work Package 4 and country-based contextual data which will be collected in the course of Work Package 5 have been decided on (see below). Also, ideas for presentational tools for the new indicators of public confidence in justice are being developed. We plan to use spider plots for country-comparison as a way to present our findings. Group spider plots will enable to compare not simply individual countries but groups of countries and differences between groups.
Work Package 5 which is under way looks into country-based contextual data to highlight local specificities and to assist the consortium in interpreting survey-based attitudinal indicators. The contextual data include nine different “baskets” which cover indicators on demography, crime levels, criminalisation & punitiveness, objective efficiency of justice, economic wealth & social inequalities, human rights record & transparency, legal reforms, media coverage of crime, confidence & concerns in areas other than criminal justice. These data form the Level 3 indicators of JUSTIS, and the resultant dataset will be an important part of analysis of any comparative survey datasets arising from JUSTIS work. In particular the Level 3 dataset will be valuable in analysis of the ‘Trust in Justice’ module of the 2010 European Social Survey. This work package is led by the University of Parma.
We are planning the second international conference of the JUSTIS project for May 2010 in Parma, Italy. The conference will assemble leading academics and others interested in the field for a two day event.
|
Home