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Appendix
Measurement of Procedural Justice
Beliefs
The bulk of research on procedural justice has dealt with attitudes and beliefs
about procedures, outcomes, leaders, and institutions. To understand fully the
research and its implications, one might wish to consider the interview and
rating questions used to measure some of the central concepts in the literature.
In this appendix we present some of the questions used in recent studies of
procedural justice.
Table A-I presents the questions used to assess perceived procedural fair-
ness in seven recent studies. This table includes items that directly assess eval-
uations of a specific procedure or experience; we present in a later table more
global questions that address a variety of procedures at once. The studies in-
cluded in the table were chosen to include a variety of methods
and a variety of
target procedures. All of the studies included the simplest assessment of pro-
cedural fairness-a question asking how fair the procedure is. Some of the
studies asked other, closely related questions, such as how satisfied the re-
spondent is with the procedure or how much the respondent would trust the
procedure in a future dispute. In the studies that use multiple questions to tap
procedural justice judgments, it is common practice to sum or average the rat-
ings from the several scales or to use factor scores to produce a single, more
reliable, index of procedural justice. The reliability statistics reported in studies
that use multiple-question indices appear to support the practice of using sum-
mative measures (e.g., Kanfer et at., 1987, report a Cronbach's alpha of .92 for
their three-item index).
For social psychologists, the term satisfaction, perhaps because it is used
frequently in social exchange theories, carries
an outcome-oriented connotation,
whereas the term
fairness is seen as connoting reactions that are more strongly
conditioned by distributional or procedural complexities. There is no evidence
and experimental subjects draw any such distinctions;
that survey respondents
ratings of satisfaction with a procedure appear to tap much the same feelings as
do ratings of the fairness of the procedure. Several studies (e.g., Lind
et at., 1980;
Walker et ai., 1974; Walker et at., 1979) report factor analyses of a variety of items
243
244 APPENDIX
TABLE A-I. Assessing Procedural Justice: Survey and Questionnaire Items
I. Evaluations of Experience with a Procedure
Study and topic Questions
Tyler &: Folger (1980)
Evaluating citizen-police encounters How fairly were you treated by the police?
Tyler &: Caine (1981)
Evaluating local political decisions How fair were the procedures used by
Councilman Jones to reach his deci-
sion?
Evaluating grading procedures How fair were the grading procedures
used in the class?
Tyler (1984)
How just
Evaluating court experiences and impartial were the pro-
cedures used by the judge in trying
your case?
Adler, Hensler, &: Nelson (1983)
Evaluating arbitration hearing experi- Now, thinking about the arbitration hear-
ences ing itself-do you think the way it was
conducted was very fair, somewhat
fair, somewhat unfair, or very unfair?
Lind, Kurtz, Musante, Walker, &: Thibaut How satisfied are you with the trial
(1980) procedure?
Evaluating laboratory adjudication How much would you trust this pro-
experience cedure in a future dispute?
How fair was the procedure used in this
trial?
Lind &: Ussak (1985) How fair was the dispute resolution pro-
Evaluating laboratory dispute resolu- cedure in which you participated?
tion How satisfied are you with the procedure
used in the dispute resolution?
To what extent would you trust the dis-
pute resolution procedure used in the
trial if you were involved in a future
dispute?
Kanfer, Sawyer, Earley &: Lind (1987) How fair is the procedure used to deter-
Evaluating performance evaluation mine which company will receive the
procedure contract?
How satisfied are you with the procedure
used to determine which company will
receive the contract?
How satisfied are you with the procedure
used to evaluate your company's per-
formance?
APPENDIX 245
designed to assess evaluative reactions to procedures. Among the rating and
survey items that have been found to load highly on procedural justice factors
are items asking about satisfaction with a procedure, items asking about the
fairness and the propriety of a procedure or "the way [something] was done,"
and items asking about trust in the procedure. Items asking about satisfaction
with outcomes, the fairness of outcomes, and the extent to which the outcomes
is based all load strongly on
reflect the true situation upon which the distribution
distributive fairness factors. It is worthwhile to remember that procedural and
distributive fairness can, and frequently are, measured by a variety of evaluative
items other than simply questions about fairness per se. The results of many
procedural fairness studies can be best understood if we remember that the
variable of interest is in fact a general evaluative response to the procedure or
social process in question.
Having mentioned the factor analyses conducted in some studies of pro-
cedural justice, we should warn about one use of such analyses that is probably
suspect. We refer to the use of factor scores based on orthogonal rotations in
factor analyses of distributive and procedural justice items. Distributive and
procedural justice appear be naturally correlated because they share causal pre-
cursors and because each form of fairness judgment probably influences the
other. Given this natural relation, orthogonal rotations can lead to ambiguous
results or erroneous judgments. For example, Lind et al. (1980) note that the
absence of effects for a manipulation of the outcome of a trial on perceptions of
procedural justice may have resulted from the use of an orthogonal rotation in
the generation of their factor score variables. More valid practices include using
oblique rotations in generating factor scores, using summed indices that do not
force orthogonality among variables, and using multivariate analysis of variance
on univariate measures.
Table A-2 reports the questions used in several studies that investigated
general evaluations of fairness in political decision making. The table includes
both studies that asked specifically about procedural fairness and studies that
generated measures of procedural justice from items asking about obviously
unfair features of procedures and then combining responses.
Table A-3 presents questions used to assess perceptions of two features of
procedures that are closely linked to procedural fairness: process control and
decision control. An appreciation of the distinction between process and deci-
sion control can be gained from comparison of the items used to measure each of
these two control concepts.
In closing we should note that the measurement of procedural justice vari-
ables has reached a level of sophistication that supports the development of
increasingly fine-etched theories, but much needs to be done. Here, as in many
other areas of social psychology, there is too little attention devoted to constancy
of measurement across studies. One of our intentions in including this section is
to provide researchers with some of the common measures used in past studies.
We hope also to spur researchers to undertake careful studies of the measure-
ment of such variables as procedural justice, distributive justice, and process
and decision control. Such studies would benefit all of us who work in this area
by providing finer instruments for the future investigation of procedural justice
phenomena.
TABLE A-2. Assessing Procedural Justice: Survey and Questionnaire Items
II. General Evaluations of Procedures
Study and topic Questions
Direct Assessment
Tyler & Caine (1981) How fair are the procedures by which govern-
Evaluating national govern- ment benefits are distributed?
ment procedures How fair are the procedures used by the govern-
ment to decide the benefits to which each citi-
zen is entitled?
How fair are the procedures by which govern-
ment policies are determined?
Tyler, Rasinski, & McGraw The government provides citizens with many
(1985) types of services and benefits, such as social se-
Evaluating national govern- curity, medicare and medicaid, housing mort-
ment procedures gage subsidies, veterans' benefits, student
loans, and unemployment and workmen's com-
pensation. How fair are the procedures by
which the government decides who will receive
government benefits?
Now a few questions about the federal taxes the
government collects to fund government pro-
grams: How fair are the procedures by which
the federal government decides the level of
taxes each citizen will pay?
Indirect Assessment
Tyler, Rasinski, & McGraw In deciding what national policies to implement
(1985) do you think that President Reagan usually,
Evaluating national govern- sometimes, or seldom considers the views of all
ment procedures sides before making decisions?
Do you think that he usually, sometimes, or sel-
dom takes enough time to consider
his policy
decisions carefully?
Does he usually, sometimes, or seldom have
enough time to make good policy decisions?
Is he usually, sometimes, or seldom unbiased and
impartial in making policy decisions?
Rasinski & Tyler (in press) In deciding what social benefit policies to support
Evaluating candidates' deci- or oppose do you think that Mr. Reagan (Mr.
sion-making procedures Mondale) will usually, sometimes, or seldom
consider the views of all sides before making
decisions?
will Mr. Reagan
How much of an opportunity
(Mr. Mondale) give citizens to express their
views before making policy decisions? Will citi-
zens have a great deal of opportunity, some
opportunity, a little opportunity, or not much
opportunity at all to express their views before
policy decisions are made?
(continued)
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