Mediation or Conventional Criminal Justice? Individual and contextual factors related to the decision

Restorative Justice (RJ) processes are by their very nature voluntary. Thereby victim and offender have to accept to participate in the process and because of this intrinsic aspect, in the RJ evaluation research, the experimental group that receives RJ is never truly randomized. As a result, the self-selection bias has been indicated as one of the biggest problems in the RJ evaluation designs. In this context, the present quantitative study aimed at understanding the importance of individual and contextual variables in the decision of hypothetical victims between the conventional criminal justice process and the restorative justice process of mediation as the response to the crime. In order to measure the choice between the two possible justice responses to the crime we used the vignette approach and a burglary victimization hypothetical scenario was presented to the subjects in a written vignette (adapted from Witvliet et al., 2008). We applied a survey to a sample of 147 college students from University of Oporto measuring sociodemographic and prior victimization variables, as well as a group of individual and contextual variables. Regarding the individual variables, we measured a group of variables related to the components of the procedural justice model, which according to the literature is one of the main theoretical conceptualizations supporting RJ interventions. Moreover, we measured the participants’ punitiveness and their justice orientations (through the Retributive and Restorative Justice Orientations Scale). Regarding the contextual variables (following the burglary hypothetical scenario), we measured participants` negative emotion (through the Scale of Negative Emotion inspired in the Basic Negative Emotion Scales of PANAS -X) and unforgiveness motivations (through the Transgression-Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM- 18)). Finally, we will discuss the results, integrating them in the relevant literature, and propose a final explaining model of the decision to participate in the mediation process based upon the discriminant analysis and logistic regression conducted. And last but not least, we will present the main conclusions of our study (advancing with some implications for future research) as well as some limitations of our research that we believe that could be improved in the future.status: publishe