When legal rights are not a reality: do individuals know their rights and how can we tell?

Public knowledge of rights has been the subject of a number of empirical enquiries over the last decade. In England and Wales, knowledge of rights and its relationship with an individual's capacity to 'self-help' and 'self-represent' when faced with a civil justice problem has become the subject of renewed attention following changes to legal aid which, from March 2013, will see the availability of legal advice and representation dramatically reduced. Previous studies focusing on public knowledge of rights in this (and other) jurisdictions have illustrated a lack of knowledge amongst the general population and more specifically, a widespread tendency of individuals to assume that the law aligns with their own moral, ethical or social attitudes. However, many of these studies have also suffered from methodological shortcomings. In attempting to address some of these shortcomings this study uses an open-ended format to ask individuals with one or one or more civil or social justice problems to describe their rights/legal position. We find that whilst an open-ended question approach to exploring knowledge of rights yields insight not acquired by other formats, its utility is constrained by difficulty reconciling articulation and actual knowledge of rights. We discuss the implications of these findings as they relate to the development of future research in the field of family and social welfare law, Public Legal Education (PLE) and access to justice post-March 2013.

The impact of crowd noise on officiating in muay thai: achieving external validity in an experimental setting.

Numerous factors have been proposed to explain the home advantage in sport. Several authors have suggested that a partisan home crowd enhances home advantage and that this is at least in part a consequence of their influence on officiating. However, while experimental studies examining this phenomenon have high levels of internal validity (since only the "crowd noise" intervention is allowed to vary), they suffer from a lack of external validity, with decision-making in a laboratory setting typically bearing little resemblance to decision-making in live sports settings. Conversely, observational and quasi-experimental studies with high levels of external validity suffer from low levels of internal validity as countless factors besides crowd noise vary. The present study provides a unique opportunity to address these criticisms, by conducting a controlled experiment on the impact of crowd noise on officiating in a live tournament setting. Seventeen qualified judges officiated on thirty Thai boxing bouts in a live international tournament setting featuring "home" and "away" boxers. In each bout, judges were randomized into a "noise" (live sound) or "no crowd noise" (noise-canceling headphones and white noise) condition, resulting in 59 judgments in the "no crowd noise" and 61 in the "crowd noise" condition. The results provide the first experimental evidence of the impact of live crowd noise on officials in sport. A cross-classified statistical model indicated that crowd noise had a statistically significant impact, equating to just over half a point per bout (in the context of five round bouts with the "10-point must" scoring system shared with professional boxing). The practical significance of the findings, their implications for officiating and for the future conduct of crowd noise studies are discussed.

Evolution and revolution: gauging the impact of technological and technical innovation on Olympic performance.

A number of studies have pointed to a plateauing of athletic performance, with the suggestion that further improvements will need to be driven by revolutions in technology or technique. In the present study, we examine post-war men's Olympic performance in jumping events (pole vault, long jump, high jump, triple jump) to determine whether performance has indeed plateaued and to present techniques, derived from models of human growth, for assessing the impact of technological and technical innovation over time (logistic and double logistic models of growth). Significantly, two of the events involve well-documented changes in technology (pole material in pole vault) or technique (the Fosbury Flop in high jump), while the other two do not. We find that in all four cases, performance appears to have plateaued and that no further "general" improvement should be expected. In the case of high jump, the double logistic model provides a convenient method for modelling and quantifying a performance intervention (in this case the Fosbury Flop). However, some shortcomings are revealed for pole vault, where evolutionary post-war improvements and innovation (fibre glass poles) were concurrent, preventing their separate identification in the model. In all four events, it is argued that further general growth in performance will indeed need to rely predominantly on technological or technical innovation.

Psychiatric morbidity and people's experience of and response to social problems involving rights.

Psychiatric morbidity has been shown to be associated with the increased reporting of a range of social problems involving legal rights ('rights problems'). Using a validated measure of psychiatric morbidity, this paper explores the relationship between psychiatric morbidity and rights problems and discusses the implications for the delivery of health and legal services. New representative national survey data from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey (CSJS) surveyed 3040 adults in 2007 to explore the relationship between GHQ-12 scores and the self reported incidence of and behaviour surrounding, rights problems. It was found that the prevalence of rights problems increased with psychiatric morbidity, as did the experience of multiple problems. It was also found the likelihood of inaction in the face of problems increased with psychiatric morbidity, while the likelihood of choosing to resolve problems without help decreased. Where advice was obtained, psychiatric morbidity was associated with a greater tendency to obtain a combination of 'legal' and 'general' support, rather than 'legal' advice alone. The results suggest that integrated and 'outreach' services are of particular importance to the effective support of those facing mental illness.

Soccer Referee Decision-Making: 'shall I Blow the Whistle?'.

Evidence points to the existence of a home advantage effect in soccer with referees giving more decisions to the home team being a plausible explanation for this effect. The purpose of the present study was to use qualitative methods to explore the factors that influence experienced referees when making decisions. Five experienced referees volunteered to participate in semi-structured interviews of 30-40 minutes duration. Examples of questions/probes included 'Are there times when it is difficult to make a decision on whether there was a foul or not? When? Why?' and 'Do you worry about making the wrong / unpopular decision? What affect does this have on you?' Content analysis identified 13 inter-related themes that describe four higher-order themes. The themes 'accuracy-error', 'regulations', and 'professionalism' form a higher-order theme labeled 'ideal-decision making'. The themes 'opinion', 'concentration', and 'control' represent a higher- order theme labeled 'individual factors'; 'experience', 'personality', and 'personal life' represent a higher-order factor labeled 'experience factors', and crowd factors, player reaction, environmental factors, and crowd interaction represent a higher-order factor labeled 'situational factors'. Findings from the present study offer some insight into difficulties and coping strategies used by referees to perform consistently in professional soccer. Future research could use quantitative methods to test the relative contribution of themes identified above to the decision-making process in referees. At an applied level, practitioners should develop strategies that accelerate the process of learning to cope with performance-related stressors such as the crowd noise. Key PointsFive experienced described factors associated with decision making in soccer leading to the identification of 13 inter-related themes that describe four higher-order themes.Higher order themes include ideal-decision making', 'individual factors', 'experience factors', and 'situational factors'.Findings from the present study offer some insight into difficulties and coping strategies used by referees to perform consistently in professional soccer.Practitioners should develop strategies that accelerate the process of learning to cope with performance-related stressors.

Evidence of nationalistic bias in muaythai.

MuayThai is a combat sport with a growing international profile but limited research conducted into judging practices and processes. Problems with judging of other subjectively judged combat sports have caused controversy at major international tournaments that have resulted in changes to scoring methods. Nationalistic bias has been central to these problems and has been identified across a range of sports. The aim of this study was to examine nationalistic bias in MuayThai. Data were collected from the International Federation of MuayThai Amateur (IFMA) World Championships held in Almaty, Kazakhstan September 2003 and comprised of tournament results from 70 A-class MuayThai bouts each judged by between five and nine judges. Bouts examined featured 62 competitors from 21 countries and 25 judges from 11 countries. Results suggested that nationalistic bias was evident. The bias observed equated to approximately one round difference between opposing judges over the course of a bout (a mean of 1.09 (SE=0.50) points difference between judges with opposing affilations). The number of neutral judges used meant that this level of bias generally did not influence the outcome of bouts. Future research should explore other ingroup biases, such as nearest neighbour bias and political bias as well as investigating the feasibility adopting an electronic scoring system. Key PointsNationalistic bias is evident in international amateur MuayThai judging.The impact on the outcome of bouts is limited.The practice of using a large number of neutral judges appears to reduce the impact of nationalistic bias.