Pina Sanchez, J orcid.org/0000-0002-9416-6022 and Gosling, JP (2022) Enhancing the Measurement of Sentence Severity through Expert Knowledge Elicitation. Journal of Legal Research Methodology, 2 (1). ISSN 2752-3403
Abstract
Quantitative research on judicial decision-making faces the methodological challenge of analysing disposal types that are measured in different units (e.g. money for fines, days for custodial sentences). To overcome this problem a wide range of scales of sentence severity have been suggested in the literature. One particular group of severity scales that has achieved high validity and reliability are those based on Thurstone’s pairwise comparisons. However, this method invokes a series of simplifying assumptions, one of them being that the range of severity covered by different disposal types is constant. We undertook an expert elicitation workshop to assess the validity of that assumption. Responses from the six criminal law practitioners and researchers that participated in our workshop unanimously pointed at severity ranges being highly variable across disposal types (e.g. much wider severity ranges were identified for suspended custodial sentences than for fines). We used this information to re-specify Thurstone’s model allowing for unequal variances. As a result, we obtained a new, more robust, scale of sentence severity.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 Jose Pina-Sanchez, John Paul Gosling. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Law (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) Not Known |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 05 May 2022 12:45 |
Last Modified: | 04 Aug 2022 13:58 |
Published Version: | https://www.northumbriajournals.co.uk/index.php/jl... |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Northumbria Journals |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:186456 |