Assessing the External Validity of Jury Research

9311660 PENROD社会科学家对陪审团决策进行了研究，以确定在民主社会中符合陪审团理想模式的过程中的因素，以及可以改变以改善陪审团功能的因素。然而，接触真实的陪审团是受法律限制的，因此许多陪审团研究人员使用模拟陪审团作为他们研究的基础。模拟陪审团有一个优势，研究人员可以仔细控制和系统地改变他们的模拟内容，以保持在真实法庭中通常无法获得的实验研究控制。然而，社会科学界和法律界的批评人士认为，在陪审团模拟中观察到的决策可能无法推广到实际审判中，而且根据模拟研究的结果制定政策可能是不明智的。这个项目将测试所使用的研究方法（陪审团研究的那些特征，有争议地使它们或多或少适用于实际案件）是否与结果的规模和性质有系统的关系。许多变量（如陪审团规模、陪审团裁决规则、陪审团对法律指示的理解以及审前宣传）已经通过模拟和对真实陪审团的现场观察进行了检验。该项目将包括若干阶段。首先，将进行一项调查，以确定所有有关的研究。其次，将回顾现有的陪审团文献和陪审团行为的理论文章，以确定编码的变量。将为所有包含的特征开发和测试一个编码方案。然后所有的研究将根据编码方案进行编码。将对这些数据进行分析，以测试完整数据集中自变量产生的平均效应量以及完整数据集中特定研究领域的平均效应量。然后将在完整的数据集和特定的研究领域中测试各种研究方法之间的关系和效应大小的大小。目标是确定任何方法学变量，这些变量可以缓和自变量的影响，从而限制模拟研究结果的可推广性。＊＊＊

9311660 PENROD Social scientists have studied jury decision-making in order to identify factors in the process that conform to the ideal model of the jury in a democratic society, as well as factors that might be changed to improve jury functioning. However, access to real juries is restricted by law and as a result many jury researchers use simulated juries as the basis for their studies. Simulated juries have the advantage that researchers can carefully control and systematically vary the content of their simulation to maintain experimental research controls not typically available in real courtrooms. Critics within the social science and legal communities argue, however, that the decision-making observed in jury simulations may not generalize to actual trials and that it may be unwise to base policies on the results of simulation research. This project will test whether the research methods used (those features of jury studies that arguably make them more or less applicable to actual cases) are systematically related to the size and nature of the results. A number of variables (such as jury size, jury decision rules, jury comprehension of legal instructions, and pretrial publicity) that have been examined using both simulations and field observations of real juries will be examined. The project will include a number of stages. First, a search will be undertaken to identify all relevant studies. Second, existing reviews of the jury literature and theoretical articles on jury behavior will be reviewed to identify variables for coding. A coding scheme for all included characteristics will be developed and tested. Then all of the studies will be coded according to the coding scheme. These data will be analyzed to test the average effect sizes produced by the independent variables in the full data set and the average effect sizes for specific research domains within the full data set. The relationships among the various research methods and the magni tude of the effect sizes will then be tested in both the full data set and the specific research domains. The goal is to identify any methodological variables that moderate the influence of the independent variables and thereby limit the generalizability of results from simulation studies. ***