Older Adults-Confidence About Law Enforcement and Courts?

I recently was called for jury duty. One of the questions asked during voir dire was about jurors’ attitudes regarding the prospect of service. That made me think of a study I ran across recently, Measuring Older Adult Confidence in the Courts and Law Enforcement, published in Criminal Justice Policy Review.  The abstract for the article explains

Older adults are an increasingly relevant subpopulation for criminal justice policy but, as yet, are largely neglected in the relevant research. The current research addresses this by reporting on a psychometric evaluation of a measure of older adults’ Confidence in Legal Institutions (CLI). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided support for the unidimensionality and reliability of the measures. In addition, participants’ CLI was related to cynicism, trust in government, dispositional trust, age, and education, but not income or gender. The results provide support for the measures of confidence in the courts and law enforcement, so we present the scale as a viable tool for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding older adults’ confidence in these institutions. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work on efforts to improve interactions between older adults and legal institutions, and we highlight avenues for further research.

Here is a short excerpt from the conclusion:

Why is it that older, older adults report more confidence in the criminal justice system than younger, older adults? Does this reflect a cohort effect or individual differences? In addition, future research should examine whether these confidence subscales predict willingness to engage or actual engagement in legal activities such as jury service, reporting crimes (as a victim or witness), or initiating litigation as well as they do in more general samples

The full article published in the journal is available here for a fee.  A pre-publication pdf from ResearchGate is available here for free.