Important to the scientific study of the judicial process is the provision of data that can be meaningfully used to answer a variety of questions about the public's use of law and the workings of courts. The purpose of the project being undertaken by Dr. Gibson is to develop and test a new method for enhancing the reliability of content analysis of judicial opinions. The method can be termed "computer-assisted content analysis," though it has little in common with the traditional computer-based methods of content analysis. In particular, the method is an adaptation of computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) technology to the coding of opinions. The project consists of several tasks. First, the CATI system will be adapted to content analysis. Second, a sample of opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court will be coded. Finally, a formal assessment of the reliability of the computer- assisted content analysis will be conducted by comparing the data to the more traditional methods of analyzing opinions. This analysis will be conducted by merging the newly-coded CATI data with data from the National Science Foundation-funded U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Data Base. This project has considerable scientific promise. It should yield a new method that can be widely adapted to coding judicial opinions not just of the United States Supreme Court but of a wide variety of different courts. Such an analytic innovation will allow judicial scholars to turn their attention to the important goal of developing comparable measures of theoretical and practical significance. As important, it should yield a technique for coding data that can be executed in a systematic, reliable, standarized, and efficient way.
