This documentary appendix supplies background descriptions of the variables and analysis for various publications growing out of the project, 'Documenting, Analyzing, and Forecasting Appellate Court Caseload Trends.'
This report first presents the basic findings of the research and describes the research design and method of analysis. It then discusses the sources of caseload statistics and other data used in the analysis and describes the checking procedure which comprised most of the work done for the study. A series of sections define appeals and other appellate court statistics used in the analysis and also describe problems encountered in gathering appellate court data and other factors that make some data misleading. Other sections describe trial court statistics, detail the sources of trial and appellate judgeship data, and describe the sources of the demographic variables. Other topics included are descriptions of miscellaneous variables and data coding. The latter description gives the values for the dichotomous variables and portrays the continuous variables as they exist in the data set and as adjusted for the regression analysis. The report concludes with a listing of trial and appellate statistics and explanations of the data sources for each State, the variations in definitions of data elements, adjustments and estimations made, and any problems that remain unresolved. Appendixes contain appellate court clerk questionnaire, plots of variables and correlation matrices.