Legal Aid, Courtworker, and Public Legal Education and Information Needs in the Northwest Territories

Appendix 1 - Summary of Legal Aid Focus Group Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, August 12, 2002

Appendix 1 - Summary of Legal Aid Focus Group * Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, August 12, 2002

1. Purpose

The purpose of the focus group was to reflect on the priorities that should be assigned, and the rationales and strategies that should be applied to 35 legal aid needs in the NWT. These needs had been identified through 87 key respondent interviews and were listed in the document distributed to participants. This list was drawn from a summary of a July 4 document entitled “Study of Legal Aid: A Point Summary of Findings to Date on Ten Research Issues” and submitted to the Department of Justice. The needs list, the summary document and an agenda were sent to participants a week in advance of the meeting.

2. Participants

Twelve participants were invited to the meeting. Nine attended in person, one by teleconference, and two could not attend. They were selected with several principles in mind:

The participants were:

3. Meeting Format

The meeting was divided into two parts, each one and three quarter hours in length.

Part One:

Following introductions and explanations, participants were asked to complete the rating document shown in Appendix 1. They then each explained the underlying principles or rationale that guided their assignment of priorities. Participants were free to change their ratings at any point in this discussion.

Part Two:

During the break the average ratings for each of the needs on the list were calculated and written on flipcharts. Participants were asked to suggest strategies and resources that would need to be mobilized to address the issues that had been rated the highest.

4. Results of the Focus Group

Averaged priority ratings assigned to each need are presented in descending order in Table 1. It should be emphasized that, because of the small group size, the notion of an “average rating” is very tenuous. Average ratings could have changed significantly with the addition of even a few more respondents; a single low rating could significantly lower the average of higher ratings assigned by the majority of respondents. The ratings, although of interest in themselves, were intended as a reflective and discussion-generating process rather than as a planning process.

Table 21: Average Priority Assigned to Legal Aid Needs by Focus Group Participants

In general, the order of the average ratings shows that the current priorities in the NWT, as perceived by the focus group participants, are:

4.1 Rationale for Priorities

Participants were asked to describe the main principles, philosophy or rationale that guided them in rating items. This was done for two reasons: (1) to foster discussion that might encourage participants to revise their rating (somewhat like a mini-Delphi exercise), and (2) to suggest principles that should be considered if the federal government directs and targets new expenditures in the area of legal aid.

The following rationales were described by participants:

4.2 Strategies for Addressing Priority Issues.

Various strategies, related to the five sets of priority issues identified earlier in section 4, are presented in Table 22.

Table 22: Strategies for High Priority Needs

* Note: This appendix is a slightly adapted version of the report of the focus group sent to the Department of Justice in mid-August 2002. Several appendices to the original report have not been included in this report.