If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that the 2024 CPR Awards were announced last week. I’ve asked the academic winners to send me an abstract or summary of their award winning works to be posted here, which I will be doing over the next couple of weeks.
As you might expect, Roselle Wissler and I (Arizona State) are still floating on air after our most recent article Comparing Joint Session and Caucus Outcomes: Factoring in Substantive Discussions and Case Characteristics, which appeared in the Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution, was chosen as the co-winner of the 2025 CPR Professional Article Award. Congratulations to our co-winner Michael Z. Green.
The article (here) is the penultimate article reporting results from our online survey involving over 1000 civil and family mediators who conduct court-based and private mediation in 8 states across the country. (Stay tuned for the final article, appearing later this year in the Journal of Dispute Resolution.)
In comparing the intermediate outcomes of initial joint sessions and initial caucuses, we needed to statistically adjust for differences between the two approaches other than whether the disputants were together or apart. Among the differences we previously found between initial joint sessions and initial caucuses were the extent of substantive discussions and information exchanges among the mediation participants and a few case characteristics, such as the level of disputant anger and lawyer contentiousness at the start of the initial session.
After we statistically adjusted for these other differences, any differences in intermediate outcomes initially seen between initial joint sessions and initial caucuses disappeared or were reduced. Thus, differences in whether parties provided several types of new information, whether disputants or lawyers made inflammatory remarks or engaged in grandstanding, and whether disputants’ anger or hostility and lawyers’ contentiousness decreased during the initial mediation session largely do not appear to be explained by whether the disputants were together or apart during the initial session, per se, but instead by differences between the two settings in actions and case characteristics.
Looking beyond the initial session to outcomes from the entire mediation, we found that that the main difference between cases where the disputants spent some time together during mediation versus no time together — disputants achieving at least some relationship repair — was reduced but did not disappear after we statistically adjusted for differences in disputants’ goals for the mediation. This suggests that spending some time together during mediation might contribute to relationship repair regardless of disputant goals. But because we did not collect information on what actions occurred during sessions after the initial one, we cannot rule out that some other factors played a role. Our subsequent article, however, provides additional evidence suggesting that substantive discussions and participant interactions are associated with informational and relational benefits when they occur during initial joint sessions, with few benefits during initial caucuses.
Additional findings counter some common assertions about initial joint sessions. Except for disputants’ inflammatory remarks in family cases, which occurred about half the time, disputants made inflammatory remarks and lawyers made inflammatory remarks or engaged in grandstanding in fewer than one-fourth of initial joint sessions. Additionally, disputants’ anger or hostility and lawyers’ contentiousness increased in only 3% to 6% of initial joint sessions and were more likely to decrease than increase over the course of the initial session.