Equal Parenting Alliance News – October 2006
© 2006 The Equal Parenting Alliance
SCORING THE SURVEY
Weighting Score
One of our aims from the survey, is to be able to publish ratings or scores for any judge, CAFCASS officer and other expert, solicitor and family court for which we get enough survey results returned.
So how are we going to calculate them?
Basically most questions in the survey have five possible answers, ranging from very good to very poor. A ‘very good’ response will score +2 points, an ‘OK’ response will score 0 points, and ‘very poor’ will score -2 points. (Unanswered questions, and all ‘Don’t Know’ responses will also score zero points).
So simply adding up all the scores would give us a simple score for that judge.
However, not all the questions are equally important, so we have also assigned a ‘weighting’
to each question, basically saying how important we think the response to this question is. So, for example, the question asking how much a judge put the interests of the child first is a very important quality of a judge, whereas the question about how well a judge treated a LIP (Litigant In Person) is – we consider – less important.
Because more important questions have a higher weighting, a ‘good’ response for an important question is worth more than a ‘good’ response for a less important question.
The weighting for a question is simply multiplied by the score for that question, and these totals summed to get an overall score.
This example show how a judge’s score can be calculated for a single survey response:
+2 +1 0 -1 -2 0
So this judge’s simple total is -8.5 (in the range -30 to +30). If we then adjust this so it is on a scale from 0 to 100, this judge’s score ends up as 36 *. A judge that had ‘very good’ in response to every question would score 100, and a judge with ‘very poor’ down the line would score zero.
In case you’re wondering, we only calculate ratings using the questions that can be scored on
our simple +2 to -2 scale. So a free text comment on a judge of “lazy, incompetent idiot” would not be taken account of in calculating a judge’s total score.
We will also, of course, be averaging scores according to the number of survey results we get. The more returns we get, the more meaningful will be the results.
* The normalised score calculation is (-8.5 + 30) x (100 / (+30 - -30)) = 35.69
How will we calculate our ‘ratings’ from the survey results?
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