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Court Research Group

Court Research Group 

Project Team: Bryan Kinney (Criminology, SFU), Gary Bass (Criminology, SFU), David Macalister (Criminology, SFU), Amir Ghaseminejad (Criminology, Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, SFU), Val Spicer (Criminology, Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, SFU), Richard Bent (Criminology, Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies, SFU). 

The Court Research Group is utilizing longitudinal BC court data (ten years) to study patterns in court sentencing. The purpose of this research is to advance knowledge and understanding of procedural justice with an emphasis on fundamental justice. This research is and will be based on advancements in the theory of Court Workgroup Theory and the joint uses of qualitative and quantitative research methods. The quantitative analysis is based on the analysis of the active archive of provincial and supreme court appearance data for British Columbia for the past ten years. The qualitative analysis adds the interpretive exploration of operations of courts and the workgroup networking of primary professionals and charged persons in court. This is a complex dataset as it contains significant details and complexity. This dataset covers the complexity of procedural pathways forms case initiation to completion. This is a growing dataset that requires archiving and at the same time, continually updated, an ideal dataset in the complexity of size and data variation.