Social-legal knowledge in adults with and without traumatic brain injury.

OBJECTIVE

To characterise social-legal knowledge in adults with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI).

METHOD: Participants, 19 adults with TBI and 21 uninjured comparison peers, completed a social-legal knowledge interview to discuss their understanding of laws and legal systems. We used grounded theory to define thematic content within participants' self-reported knowledge.

RESULTS

Social-legal knowledge in both groups comprised five thematic categories. Three categories (normative rules, legal procedures, and structural characteristics) described the legal system itself, whereas two categories (personal anecdotes and uncertainty) described the participants' relationship to the law. Participants' social-legal knowledge was often technical and complex, defining a clear 'arrest-trial-jail' schema and well-defined roles for legal actors; however, participants often struggled to expand knowledge or to answer follow-up questions, and participants tended to frame the structural characteristics and their personal anecdotes negatively. Post-hoc analysis of total coded items showed no between-group differences in any of the five thematic categories.

CONCLUSION

Adults with moderate-to-severe TBI articulated complex, albeit superficial, social-legal knowledge, with no thematic differences to the knowledge of adults without TBI. The results identify key thematic content areas that comprise social-legal knowledge in adults with and without TBI and highlight areas of relative strength and relative weakness within lay persons' internal understanding of laws and legal systems.