Research in Family Law: The Need for Better Statistical Information

John Haskey

Visiting Senior Research Fellow Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy Department of Social Policy and Intervention University of Oxford

Over the years I have browsed the volume Judicial and Court Statistics but always found it a frustrating volume not being able to find exactly what I wanted or any background. Indeed the impression I gain from that statistical compendium is that the statistical information has been collated primarily for the purpose of quantifying the caseload of courts and the profile of work of each court. While such information is no doubt important financially and for planning purposes the seeming inability to share the same data for research purposes represents an enormously lost opportunity. Important questions such as why certain trends occur and what is ‘best practice' cannot begin to be addressed from such counts.

Furthermore Judicial and Court Statistics by and large contains only basic counts; there are very few statistical tables in which two or more factors are cross-tabulated. The provision of such...

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