Procedural justice refers to people's evaluations of how fairly they are treated during decision-making processes. More than 30 years of research has demonstrated a strong relationship between perceptions of fair treatment and decision-related outcomes, including respect for decision-makers (e.g., legal authorities) and compliance with sanctions. While a few researchers have extended procedural justice theory to children, none have done so from a theoretically-grounded developmental perspective. This research examines minors? sensitivity to procedural treatment from the lens of social-cognitive domain theory, which holds that children's reasoning about morality differs depending on which domain that treatment belongs. Specifically, this study addresses the following questions: 1) How is age related to sensitivity in variations in procedural treatment?; 2) What kind of reasoning do children use when evaluating procedural treatment?; 3) What developmental differences exist in children's reasoning about procedural treatment? To answer these questions, the PI will employ a vignette design involving a scenario describing a transgression committed by a child followed by a punishment meted out by an authority (parent, teacher, or judge). The punishment context allows for the introduction of three components of procedural treatment: voice, consistency, and respect.
The results of this research will inform both legal psychology and developmental psychology. In the field of legal psychology, the results will expand knowledge of whether procedural justice is highly relevant to children as it is adults. In the field of developmental psychology, the results will expand knowledge of domain theory into new territory -- reasoning about procedural treatment as a form of moral behavior.
Finally, the research has potentially significant policy implications. Procedural justice dialogue has been used to advocate for children's increased in involvement in child custody and child protection decision-making. This research will begin to answer the question of whether and when such involvement is appropriate and beneficial.
The purpose of this project was to support preliminary research investigating children's expectations about how authority figures of different kinds (e.g., parents, teachers, and police) should treat them. In the legal context, we know that adults, especially American adults, have expectations about how they are going to be treated in the legal system. Many of these expectations are linked to our due process rights (e.g., the right to defend ourselves), but some of them are broader (e.g., being given respect and treated with dignity). In the field of psychology, we refer to this broad set of expectations as "procedural justice;" in other words, adults perceive a legal process as fair when they are treated with dignity and respect, neutrality, and given a chance to defend themselves. Importantly, psychological research suggests that when individuals experience high levels of procedural justice in the legal context, they are more likely to comply with the law and respect the law as an institution. In other words, their personal experiences with legal actors color their future behavior with and attitudes about the legal system. Recently, some researchers have emphasized the potential importance of applying these ideas to the developmental context. For example, how and when do children develop expectations about procedural justice? Do their reflections on their fair treatment in one context, like school, carry over to their expectations about fair treatment in another context, like the law? How do this socialization process predict outcomes like delinquency and school behavior problems? This funding provided financial support for a preliminary study designed to begin to answer these questions. I developed child-friendly measures of expectations about procedural justice in a variety of contexts that ranged from home and school to doctor's offices and courtrooms. Nearly 100 children (6-15 years old) participated in the study, which included an interview during which they were read stories about a child interacting with an authority figure and asked to respond. The primary purpose of this pilot funding was to support the development of these measures and the interview protocol to be used in future research. In addition to developing these reliable measures, we have preliminary findings about children's expectations which will provide a foundation for future studies. For example, even at young ages, children are highly attuned to violations of the neutrality expectation and declare unfairness when read a story about two children being treated differently for breaking the same rule. On the other hand, there are clear age-related trends in children's reactions to other kinds of procedural violations. Younger children, for example, do not have as strong an expectation of being able to defend themselves when they broke a rule or of being treated "respectfully," but older children do seem to have these expectations. These preliminary findings support the contention that children are socialized to have these expectations through their experiences with multiple institutional settings.
