Abstract
Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various statements about principles to use in setting child support amounts. These twenty items were derived from extant child support systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman’s (2008) Theory of Child Support. The twenty items were found to coalesce into four factors (principles). There were pervasive gender differences in respondent’s endorsement of the principles. More importantly, three of these four principles were systematically reflected, in very rational (if complex) ways, in the respondents’ resolution of the individual child support cases they were asked to decide. Differences among respondents in their endorsement of these three principles accounted for differences in their patterns of child support judgments. It is suggested that the pattern of coherent arbitrariness (Ariely et al., Q J Econ 118(1):73–105, 2003) in those support judgments, noted in an earlier study (Ellman, Braver, & MacCoun, 2009) is thus partially explained, in that the seeming arbitrariness of respondents’ initial support judgments reflect in part their differing views about the basic principles that should decide the cases.
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Notes
We do not here present, analyze or discuss 3 additional Likert items that did not relate explicitly to child support principles. Four of the principles were drawn from Ellman and Ellman (2008), while six others captured views from other publications as well as mother’s and father’s groups. We used twenty items to measure the ten different principles because we intentionally stated most of the principles in more than one format. (E.g., not only a positive but also a negative version, in which disagreement with the statement would indicate agreement with the principle, as well as otherwise identical versions in which reference was, or was not, made to the custodial mother along with the child.).
This procedure discarded the 34 respondents (4%) whose status as support obligor or obligee was gender-atypical, or who had experience as both support obligor and support obligee.
The following analyses were based on the 260 respondents in the Name and Choose conditions who completed both the Likert and the scenario portions of the survey with no missing data. This subset of respondents yields average values for Fig. 1 that are slightly different than the analogous ones reported in Ellman et al. (2009).
Following Aiken and West (1991), these values were computed by inserting into the final equation implied by Table 4 the mean values over all respondents for Dual Obligation and Limiting Father’s Responsibility, while for Gross Disparity Plus we inserted either the mean value (M = 4.92) plus the standard deviation (SD = 1.33), for strong supporters (=6.25), or the mean value minus the standard deviation (=3.59), for weak supporters. “Weak supporters” in this case were thus in mild disagreement with the principle, as the midpoint in the seven-point Likert scale was 4.
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Ellman, I.M., Braver, S.L. & MacCoun, R.J. Abstract Principles and Concrete Cases in Intuitive Lawmaking. Law Hum Behav 1 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-011-9268-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-011-9268-2