Revue - Droit et société n°118-2024 - 125

Working Time and Work Intensity in Portuguese Courts
(from 1- " strongly disagree " to 5- " strongly agree " ). Our statements were based
on those proposed by EUROFOUND and adapted to the working context of courts.
Tables 2 and 3 show the questions asked in the questionnaire related to the working
time and work intensity dimensions. These indicators allow for an individual
analysis and an aggregated approach, as well as indexing working time quality
and work intensity.
II. 2. Case Studies with Interviews
The 73 semi-structured interviews were conducted between April and July 2021 with
judicial professionals (judges, public prosecutors, and court clerks) working in the
court buildings of Central Lisbon and Coimbra district courts, the two case studies
selected for QUALIS. These are courts of first instance of the judicial branch. The
Central Lisbon district comprises nine locations and eleven buildings, throughout
which multiple services are distributed. The buildings are located on both banks
of the Tagus River (the Lisbon metropolitan area), their territorial jurisdiction
spanning seven municipalities. The Coimbra district comprises twenty buildings
spread over a large territory that includes seventeen different municipalities. Despite
the diverse size of the buildings and the varied nature of the services operating
in each, we made sure that there was at least one interview per building. Given
the size of the buildings, two or three interviews were conducted in most of them.
In the latter case, it was decided that the interviewees had to be from different
professions. The buildings of the administrative courts of first instance, a parallel
branch to judicial courts, located in these geographical areas, were also included
in the interview sample, which meant the addition of two buildings.
Although the interviews were exclusively focused on the district courts of
Coimbra and Central Lisbon, the fact that these districts have a vast territorial
remit means that they present a wide variety of situations and contexts and, therefore,
the qualitative analysis and discussion of the results from the case studies
cover very similar situations and contexts found in most of the other 21 district
courts in Portugal.
Of the 73 interviews, 68 were conducted digitally, via Zoom, and five in person:
four on the court's premises and one at the Center for Social Studies. In all,
22 judges, 23 public prosecutors, and 28 court clerks were interviewed, of whom
45 were women and 38 men. On average, the interviews were 82 minutes long.
All participants signed an informed consent form agreeing to the recording of the
interview. All interviews were transcribed and anonymized.51 To protect interviewee
anonymity, the selected quotations only identify their profession. The script of
the interviews, including a section relating to the impact of COVID-19, was built
in close articulation with the structure of the questionnaire.
51. Interview excerpts use codification in terms of profession and location. The three professions
interviewed are the Judges, Public Prosecutors, and Court Clerks; in terms of location, we use LX for
Central Lisbon and CBR for Coimbra.
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Revue - Droit et société n°118-2024

Table des matières de la publication Revue - Droit et société n°118-2024