Many theories of legal behavior and legal processes include implicit or explicit assumptions about how people come to be involved with the law or about the needs that legal institutions fulfill. Because disputed claims are the raw material of the civil justice system, an understanding of the claiming process goes to the heart of who uses the legal system, under what circumstances, for what purposes, and with what consequences. One of the truisms in the study of law and society is that there are enormous numbers of potential claims that are never pursued. Despite the importance of claiming behavior for legal theory and policy, relatively little empirical work has addressed the topic since existing data lack the time-based comparisons needed for definitive tests of what causes some people to claim compensation while other similarly injured people do not. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) recently awarded a grant to the Institute for Civil Justice at RAND for a study of accidental injury compensation that provides an opportunity to test some of these issues. Drs. Hensler and Lind will conduct a panel study that will be coordinated with the DHHS survey. They will reinterview 400 of the respondents in the DHHS survey in order to gather pre-claim and post-claim measures of a number of factors that might drive claiming behavior. A control group of 100 injured individuals will be interviewed a single time to test for reactivity effects. By using the approach of reinterviewing a sample of injured individuals over time, it will be possible to determine the sequence of events such as injury progression, loss accrual, and acquisition of knowledge about the legal process that leads to claiming. Several models of claiming behavior will be tested including a fault-responsibility-equity model, economic models, and a procedural model. The results of the analyses will be used to develop more integrative theories of claiming. The DHHS study will provide a nationally representative and rich database on the characteristics and economic and social consequences of injuries using a cross-sectional approach. This grant, using the panel study approach, will provide opportunities for comparing the predictive value of a variety of claiming models that derive from different disciplinary traditions. The research will significantly improve our basic understanding of the dynamics of claiming compensation for injury. In addition, the two databases, which will be archived at the completion of the project, will provide a resource for further analytic work.
