Toward the Assessent of Procedural and Distributive Justice in Resolving Family Disputes

The first phase of this study focused on the development of comprehensive, conceptually integrated measures of procedural & distributive justice in the context of family decision-making. In the second phase, these measures were used to examine older adolescents' justice appraisals of specific family disputes & the relation of these justice appraisals to family systems functioning along dimensions of conflict & cohesion. A Family Justice Inventory was constructed, which included two global indices (one for procedural justice & one for outcome fairness) & 13 subscales: 9 measuring specific facets of the procedural justice construct & 4 measuring specific dimensions of the distributive justice construct. Factor analysis revealed that the 13 Family Justice Inventory subscales could be reduced to 5 interpretable procedural justice factors (personal respect, status recognition, process control, correction, & trust) & 4 interpretable distributive justice factors (decision control, need, equality, & equity). Using procedural justice factor scores in regression analyses, personal respect, status recognition, correction, & trust each accounted for unique variance in family conflict & family cohesion. Using distributive justice factor scores in regression analyses, both decision control & need accounted for unique variance in family conflict & family cohesion. Using both procedural & distributive justice factor scores in regression analyses, personal respect, status recognition, & trust each accounted for unique variance in both family conflict & family cohesion. Additionally, equity also accounted for unique variance in family conflict but not family cohesion & the direction of the relationship was positive, that is, more equity in resolving specific family disputes was associated higher levels of general family conflict. 5 Tables, 3 Appendixes, 45 References. Adapted from the source document.