DOI: 10.3886/icpsr03864.v2
title: Public Opinion on the Courts in the United States, 2000
title: Version 2

description: This study centered on two questions fundamental to
understanding public opinion about the courts: (1) Do African
Americans, Latinos, and Whites view the state courts differently? and
(2) What impact did recent direct court experience have on people's
opinions about state courts? Between March 22, 2000, and May 3, 2000,
interviewers conducted 1,567 telephone interviews with randomly
selected United States residents. Variables include respondents'
gender, race, age, education, and other demographic information,
respondents' perception of the fairness of local courts, including
whether African Americans and Latinos were discriminated against,
whether the respondent or a member of the respondent's household had
been involved with the courts in the past 12 months, and if so, how
fairly that case was conducted.
description: This study centered on two questions fundamental
 to understanding public opinion about the courts: (1) Do African
 Americans, Latinos, and Whites view the state courts differently? and
 (2) What impact did recent direct court experience have on people's
 opinions about state courts? The distinctive contribution of this
 study was its exploration at a national level of the intersection of
 race and court experience with regard to perceptions of courts.
 Previous studies examined this intersection only in cities and
 states. This study also sought to answer several related questions:
 (1) Do Latinos have distinct views on state courts, or are their views
 closely tied to the views of Whites or African Americans? (2) Do
 individuals with recent court experience differ from those with more
 distant experience in the antecedents and nature of their views? (3)
 Does the type of experience (as jurors, litigants, or witnesses)
 affect racial groups differently, and does the presumed positive
 influence of jury service extend to African Americans and Latinos? (4)
 What level of support is there for courts playing nontraditional
 roles in cases involving complex emotional and social problems, like
 substance abuse and mental illness, and what does this level of
 support say about views of the courts as they currently stand? (5) How
 much does the media influence views of the courts relative to the
 influence of direct experience with courts? (6) What factors make
 people willing to return to courts in the future, and do these factors
work in a similar way across racial and ethnic groups?
description: Between March 22, 2000, and May 3, 2000,
 interviewers conducted 1,567 telephone interviews with randomly
 selected United States residents. The project staff at the National
 Center for State Courts designed the survey instrument and revised it
 based on a review by the advisory committee members and staff from the
 Indiana University Public Opinion Laboratory (IUPOL). Pretests were
 used to refine the survey instrument. The final instrument contained
 two sets of questions. The first set of questions was directed at all
 respondents. The second set of questions was directed only at those
 respondents with court experience in the last 12 months. A translator
 under contract to the IUPOL prepared a Spanish version of the survey
 instrument. The translation was reviewed and revised by two certified
 Spanish court interpreters. The interviews were conducted by
 professional interviewers at the IUPOL from special facilities on the
 Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus. All
 interviewers received at least four hours of general training in
 addition to specific training for this project. Most of the
 interviewers had previous experience in other survey research
 projects. Selected phone numbers were called until an interview was
 successfully conducted or: (1) the respondent refused to participate
 on three separate occasions, (2) a disconnected or not-in-service
 number was encountered, or (3) attempts to call the number yielded a
 no answer, busy signal, or answering machine on 20 separate
occasions.
description: Demographic variables include respondent gender,
 age, race, education, country of birth, part of Latin America to which
 ancestry was traced, age when moved to the continental United States,
 language most spoken in the household, marital status, number of people in
 the household, combined household income the year before, and state of
 residence. Other variables include respondents' assessments of how
 well local courts handle criminal, civil, family relations, and
 juvenile delinquency cases, respondents' ratings of local courts,
 police, and schools, rating of fairness of local courts, assessments
 of how equally courts treat African Americans, Latinos, non-English
 speakers, and people with low incomes, whether courts should intervene
 in cases in nontraditional ways to try to solve the problems that
 bring people into court, perceptions about opportunity and racial
 discrimination in the United States, whether the respondent or a
 member of the respondent's household had been involved with the courts
 in the past 12 months, role in case, kind of case, assessments of how
 fairly the case was conducted and how fairly the respondent or
 household member was treated, and factors that influenced the
respondents' impressions of how the courts in their community worked.
description: Response Rates: The target sample of 1,005 was achieved after 53,933
 total dialings. The African American oversample of 308 was completed
 after 22,140 total dialings. The Latino oversample of 254 was
completed after 33,034 total dialings.
description: Presence of Common Scales: Several Likert-type scales were used.
description: The sample was a national, random-digit-dialing sample
 with quotas based on the Troldahl-Carter-Bryant method of respondent
 selection (Troldahl and Carter [1964], and Bryant [1975], reprinted in
 Lavrakas [1987]). In addition to a target sample of 1,005 randomly
 selected respondents, the sample included supplemental oversamples of
 308 African Americans and 254 Latinos. This sampling strategy sought
 to correct for the tendency of telephone surveys to underrepresent
 minority groups. Among all ethnic groups, approximately half of the
 participants were to be chosen based on recent (within the past 12
 months) court experience. This was difficult to achieve. Latinos who
 had recent court experience and who were willing to be interviewed
 were difficult to locate. The cost per interview reached a point at
 which it was necessary to stop the data collection process for that
 subgroup. As a result, 40 percent rather than the desired 50 percent
 of Latinos in the sample had had a recent court experience. In
 general, the number of African Americans and Latinos in the sample
with recent court experience is small.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: Public Opinion on the Courts in the United States, 2000
description: Adult residents of the United States between March 22,
2000, and May 3, 2000. Smallest Geographic Unit: ZIP code