journal_vol49no3 - 77

Under Pressure: The Impacts of Judicialization
While there is little research on the ways that the legalistic inclinations of today's
student conduct landscape create critogenic harms for its full-time practitioners, there
is even less on how those staff who serve as both residential staff and conduct administrator
experience and manifest the impacts. This manuscript serves to fill that gap by
identifying the ways that conduct administration may affect the well-being of housing
and residence life staff who perform conduct work.
METHODOLOGY
Data were collected using the Concerns About Litigation Survey for Student Conduct
Professionals (CALSSCP) instrument (Glassman, 2021), which was designed to assess
the impacts of judicialization using three subscales that correspond to three realms:
Subscale A (impacts on professional work), Subscale B (beliefs about judicialization),
and Subscale C (impacts on personal life). This survey was adapted from several
peer-reviewed instruments that had been used to assess physicians' and law enforcement
officers' physical and emotional responses to litigation or the threat thereof. It
was hypothesized that student conduct administrators share many personality traits
with doctors, such as being perfectionistic, having a high ethic of care for their stakeholders,
and applying their best judgment in uncertain situations (McLeod, 2003).
It seemed possible that these characteristics may also make college and university
administrators with student conduct responsibilities more susceptible to critogenic
harms, thereby impacting their well-being and abilities to cope with the stressors of
the workplace.
Responses from Subscale C (questions 29-40 of the CALSSCP) were analyzed
for purposes of this study. Figure 1 (see page 75) lists the items in this section of the instrument.
The questions in Subscale C were adapted from earlier published studies on
the impacts of litigation stress on psychologists (Wilbert & Fulero, 1988), the attitudes
and reactions of physicians to medical error (Benbassat et al., 2001), and the feelings
experienced by radiologists who had been sued for alleged malpractice (Fileni et al.,
2007). Because the aforementioned studies contained questions that specifically evaluated
aspects of the participants' well-being and because the current research seeks to
understand how litigation stress and other environmental factors of the student conduct
landscape impact its practitioners, it was deemed relevant to translate some of the
questions targeted to physicians into language evaluating the experiences of student
conduct administrators.
Subscale C asked participants to report their level of agreement from 5 (Describes
me greatly) to 1 (Does not describe me at all). Several items were reverse-worded, with
the results reported here representing the reverse-coded data. Using Cronbach's alpha,
the reliability of the instrument in the current study was α = .884 (for Subscale A,
α = .791; for Subscale B, α = .655; and for Subscale C, α = .798).
A purposive sampling strategy was used to recruit residence life professionals with
student conduct responsibilities. Participants were recruited via residence life-oriented
74 The Journal of College and University Student Housing
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