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Summary

McCold, Paul and Wachtel, Ted (1999). Restorative justice theory validation Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference of the International Network for Research on Restorative Justice for Juveniles. Tübingen, Germany, 1-4 October.

McCold and Wachtel maintain that the rise of restorative justice practices has preceded theory. Nevertheless, the social sciences have a vital role to play in providing description, theory, and evaluation. Assertions about what constitutes good practices should be tested; that is, the scientific method (proposing and testing theoretical concepts) should play a critical role in developing a valid restorative justice theory. Toward that end, in this paper the authors aim to test the validity of key hypotheses derived from restorative justice theory with currently available research.

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