Research Methods: Our Approach to Socio-Legal Research

Legal research has traditionally focused on ‘law in books’, offering a debate and critique of legal doctrine and case law. More recently, legal research has moved to embrace a socio-legal approach and methodological diversity with the result that today qualitative or quantitative research that considers ‘law in action’ is becoming more widely accepted. We adopted a socio-legal approach for this book, conducting quantitative analysis on over 750 disability discrimination cases lodged at the Employment Tribunal in England and Wales. We set out our research methods in this chapter. The key studies that influenced our research, Barnard and Ludlow (Industrial Law Journal, 45(1), 1–28, 2016), Lockwood et al. (International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 14(3), 168–182, 2014), Urwin et al. (British Journal of Industrial Relations, 52(1), 158–184, 2014) and the Survey of Employment Tribunals (2013) by the Department for Business and Trade, are outlined and discussed. We present the development of our code book which was adapted from these studies with variables that suited our research questions. The sampling process is outlined in detail, including how we obtained judgments initially available only in hard copy and then subsequently online. We present our analysis, where we used descriptive statistics, Pearson’s chi-square tests, as well as binary and multinomial logistic regression. The chapter concludes by noting the main limitations in our study.