Family mediation research: Is there empirical support for the field?

When family mediation emerged on a national level twenty-five years ago, divorce mediation was promoted as less expensive and timeconsuming, more humane and satisfying to participants than litigation, resulting in better compliance with agreements and reduced relitigation. It was expected to enhance problem-solving skills among the disputants, promote cooperation and communication regarding children, and result in better adjustment of adults and their children to the divorce, and be more empowering of the participants than traditional adversarial processes. Research was initiated in public and private sectors to assess these claims and to respond to the strident challenges and opposition to divorce mediation that quickly emerged. Lawyers were openly skeptical that the process was more fair and less costly. Women’s advocates, who questioned women’s ability to negotiate equitable arrangements with men, made policy pronouncements advising women against participating in mediation. Ironically, these claims were made in the absence of empirical studies assessing the fairness and impact of adversarial divorce processes on participants, including those with a history of domestic violence. Early research focused on the basic questions of settlement rates, client satisfaction, time and cost efficiencies, comparison of outcomes, compliance, and, to a lesser extent, impacts on parental conflict, communication, cooperation, and psychological adjustment (see Beck and Sales, 2000; Emery, 1994; Kelly, 1996). This first-generation research, conducted in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia, constitutes the largest body of empirical research among any of the mediation sectors. Variations in research populations, methodologies, measures, and dispute settings have been the norm, making it problematic to generalize about family mediation or rely on a single study. Many research publications failed to provide basic descriptors, such as the nature of the population served, number of