The ASA’s Missed Opportunity to Promote Sound Science in Court

Gregory Mitchell, John Monahan and Laurens Walker

Sociological Methods & Research, 2011, vol. 40, issue 4, 605-620

Abstract: The American Sociological Association (ASA) filed an amicus brief in Wal-Mart v. Dukes in which the ASA defended the testimony of the plaintiffs’ sociological expert. Unfortunately, the ASA’s portrayal and defense of the method and opinions of this expert do not match the actual method used, and opinions offered, by the expert in the Wal-Mart case. The authors demonstrate that none of the ASA’s defenses of the expert’s method has merit and that the expert violated basic methodological rules set out by the ASA’s own sources. The opinions to which the expert testified, therefore, lacked a scientific foundation.

Keywords: experts; qualitative research; employment discrimination; social science and law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0049124111412714 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:somere:v:40:y:2011:i:4:p:605-620

DOI: 10.1177/0049124111412714

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Methods & Research
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().