Grievances, Claims, and Disputes: Assessing the Adversary Culture

The existence of a dispute has typically been the starting point for inquiries into dispute processing and resolution. This paper explores the origins of disputes in grievances and claims. It reports on a survey of households estimating the rates of grievances, claims, and disputes which could have been processed by a civil court of general jurisdiction. The paper also explores multivariate models of the probabilities that households experience substantial grievances, that claims for redress are made, and that disputes result. The models assess the contributions of household and problem characteristics to these transitions. By treating disputes as problematic outcomes of injurious experiences, the paper contributes to an assessment of the adversariness of American society.