Letting the Field Show us the Way – a Mixed Methodology to Understand Judicial Decision Making

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to describe the methodology used in three studies to obtain data from a Portuguese Criminal Court in order to undertake a psychological analysis of judicial decision-making in the criminal justice system to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon. Because information about the Portuguese criminal system is scarce, the design and definition of the studies was adapted from literature and our experience derived from the contact with the field. We explain how this methodology arose, particularly how it was designed and formulated through contact with the field and with the actors – the judges – in the decision making process that we were studying. This approximated an ethnographic type of approach to reality. We focused on criminal court judges as the starting point and source of our data.