Reassessing the relationship between procedural justice and police legitimacy.

OBJECTIVE: A large body of cross-sectional research has identified a positive relationship between perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy. Following Tyler's theoretical framework, studies have often interpreted the observed relationship as evidence of an unequivocal causal connection from procedural justice to legitimacy. Here we reexamined the validity of this conclusion by considering the temporal order of that association and the potential biasing effect of time-invariant third common causes. HYPOTHESES: (a) Past perceptions of police procedural justice would predict future perceptions of legitimacy; (b) Past perceptions of police legitimacy would predict future perceptions of procedural justice; and (c) Perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy would be associated as a result of 3rd common causes. METHOD: We fitted random intercepts cross-lagged panel models to 7 waves of a longitudinal sample of 1,354 young offenders (M = 16 years) from the "Pathways to Desistance" study. This allowed us to explore the directional paths between perceptions of police procedural justice and legitimacy, while controlling for time-invariant participant heterogeneity. RESULTS: We did not find evidence of the assumed temporal association; lagged within-participant perceptions of procedural justice rarely predicted within-participant perceptions of legitimacy. We did not find evidence of a reciprocal relationship either. Instead, we detected substantial time-invariant participant heterogeneity, and evidence of legitimacy perceptions being self-reproduced. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings challenge the internal validity of the commonly reported positive associations between procedural justice and legitimacy reported in studies using cross-sectional data. Most of such association is explained away after considering time-invariant participant heterogeneity and previous perceptions of legitimacy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Exploring the origin of sentencing disparities in the Crown Court: Using text mining techniques to differentiate between court and judge disparities.

Research on sentence consistency in England and Wales has focused on disparities between courts, with differences between judges generally ignored. This is largely due to the limitations in official data. Using text mining techniques from Crown Court sentence records available online we generate a sample of 7,212 violent and sexual offences where both court and judge are captured. Multilevel time-to-event analyses of sentence length demonstrate that most disparities originate at the judge, not the court-level. Two important implications follow: i) the extent of sentencing consistency in England and Wales has been underestimated; and ii) the importance attributed to the location in which sentences are passed - in England and Wales and elsewhere - needs to be revisited. Further analysis of the judge level disparities identifies judicial rotation across courts as a practice conducive of sentence consistency, which suggests that sentencing guidelines could be complemented with other, less intrusive, changes in judicial practice to promote consistency.

Testing the cultural-invariance hypothesis: A global analysis of the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes to science.

A substantial body of research has demonstrated that science knowledge is correlated with attitudes towards science, with most studies finding a positive relationship between the two constructs; people who are more knowledgeable about science tend to be more positive about it. However, this evidence base has been almost exclusively confined to high and middle-income democracies, with poorer and less developed nations excluded from consideration. In this study, we conduct the first global investigation of the science knowledge-attitude relationship, using the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor survey. Our results show a positive knowledge-attitude correlation in all but one of the 144 countries investigated. This robust cross-national relationship is consistent across both science literacy and self-assessed measures of science knowledge.

Personality and Survey Satisficing.

In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don't Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response styles. We find large effects of these personality dimensions on the propensity to satisfice in both face-to-face and self-administration modes and in probability and nonprobability samples. People who score high on Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were less likely to be in the top decile of straightlining and midpoint distributions. The findings for Don't Know responding were weaker and only significant for Conscientiousness in the nonprobability sample. We also find large effects across all satisficing indicators for a direct measure of cognitive ability, where existing studies have mostly relied on proxy measures of ability such as educational attainment. Sensitivity analysis suggests the personality effects are likely to be causal in nature.

Are sleep quality judgments comparable across individuals, places, and spaces? An interdisciplinary analysis of data from 207,608 individuals across 68 countries.

OBJECTIVES: Significant research has shown that health is a heterogeneous concept, and one person's poor health may not be comparable with another's. Yet, little consideration has been given to whether sleep quality judgments are also heterogeneous or whether they cohere between individuals. Another possibility is that there are group differences in the ways in which sleep quality is perceived. If this is the case, it is possible known inequalities in sleep are-in part-an artifact of social position influencing how we conceive of sleep problems. The current study explores this possibility. DESIGN: Cross-sectional, using World Health Organization data from 207,608 individuals; aged between 15 and 101 years of age from 68 countries. Alongside a battery of sleep and demographic variables, data contained sleep and energy vignettes. Random effect anchoring vignette models were applied to investigate interpersonal incompatibility and whether sleep quality perceptions operate differently depending on social location, context, and function. RESULTS: While sleep quality judgments are largely comparable across individuals, findings also highlight how the relationship between education and self-reported sleep changes following adjustment for reporting heterogeneity. Estimates of threshold parameters suggest that those with more years of education have a slightly increased threshold for reporting mild sleep problems (B 0.005; s.e. 0.001) but a lower threshold for reporting sleep problems as extreme (B -0.007; s.e. 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Sleep quality judgments occupy a complex position between heterogeneity and coherence. This has implications for both epidemiological methodologies and contemporary debates about social justice, public health and sleep.

Trust in science, social consensus and vaccine confidence.

While scholarly attention to date has focused almost entirely on individual-level drivers of vaccine confidence, we show that macro-level factors play an important role in understanding individual propensity to be confident about vaccination. We analyse data from the 2018 Wellcome Global Monitor survey covering over 120,000 respondents in 126 countries to assess how societal-level trust in science is related to vaccine confidence. In countries with a high aggregate level of trust in science, people are more likely to be confident about vaccination, over and above their individual-level scientific trust. Additionally, we show that societal consensus around trust in science moderates these individual-level and country-level relationships. In countries with a high level of consensus regarding the trustworthiness of science and scientists, the positive correlation between trust in science and vaccine confidence is stronger than it is in comparable countries where the level of social consensus is weaker.

Public attitudes to genomic science: an experiment in information provision.

We use an experimental panel study design to investigate the effect of providing "value-neutral" information about genomic science in the form of a short film to a random sample of the British public. We find little evidence of attitude change as a function of information provision. However, our results show that information provision significantly increased dropout from the study amongst less educated respondents. Our findings have implications both for our understanding of the knowledge-attitude relationship in public opinion toward genomic science and for science communication more generally.