Selecting Exclusionary Rules and Practices
The previous project, “The Evolution of Western Criminal Justice Policy in a World of Increasing Social Exclusion” (2013-2016), identified 236 items consisting of punitive rules and practices that seemed to be appropriate for identifying effects of social exclusion on the project’s target groups.
The starting point of the RIMES project was to examine these 236 items against the criteria of completeness (importance of the data), extension (that the aspect is not too specific), ease of access (that the information is relatively simple to obtain), discrimination capacity (it permits differentiation among Western developed countries) and clarity (the item can be easily understood).
For this task, the research and work team was divided into two groups and distributed according to the participant’s expertise in the different pools of the theoretical model. This was assesed by using the Delphi qualitative method, which consists in asking each member about their degree of knowledge and experience.
At the same time, two questionnaires were designed, each of which contained half of the 236 items initially selected. Each questionnaire was assigned to one of the groups and participants had to give a score of 1 to 5 to each evaluation criterion for each of the 118 items.
The results obtained from both questionnaires made it possible to eliminate those items which, in the opinion of the group, displayed less completeness, extension, ease of access, discrimination capacity and clarity. On the other hand, the items scoring 3 or more in all the criteria were kept. When there was doubt regarding an item, the participants met to discuss it and decided jointly if it should be accepted or rejected.
In this way the participants agreed on a number of items (rules and practices) that remained numerous but more solid, and which was the one that underwent, in the next phase, validation by international experts.