Tani, Massimiliano; Vines, Prue --- "Law Students' Attitudes to Education: Pointers to Depression In the Legal Academy and the Profession?" [2009] LegEdRev 2; (2009) 19(1) Legal Education Review 3
[*] Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia.
[**] Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia.
[1] Massimiliano Tani (ed), Report: On the Motivations, Expectations, and Experiences of Students in Tertiary Education: Findings from a Large Survey Carried Out at the University of New South Wales (2006) <http://tls.vu.edu.au/learning_and_teaching/guidelines/VU11/Tani%20UNSW%20report%20-December%202006.pdf> at 23 December 2009.
[2] UNSW in 2005 had approximately 35 000 students. Two-thirds of our respondents were Australian citizens. The cultural background of 50 per cent of all UNSW students was self-identified as ‘Asian’, predominantly Chinese. Respondents identified themselves as having Anglo-Saxon background in the following percentages: Law (17 per cent), Medicine (20 per cent), Arts/Social Sciences (22 per cent), Engineering (33 per cent), College Of Fine Arts (33 per cent) and Commerce/Economics (4 per cent). The remainder were a broad mix reflecting the multicultural nature of Australian society.
[3] Tani, above n 1, 17, 26.
[4] Norm Kelk et al, Courting the Blues: Attitudes Towards Depression in Australian Law Students and Legal Practitioners’ (2009). The results of this survey carried out by the NSW Brain and Mind Institute were presented at the UNSW Tristan Jepson Memorial Lecture by Professor Ian Hickie, 18 September 2008.
[5] The study is not based on any particular theory of learning styles but does implicitly rely upon an information processing model which draws on personality theory. On learning styles, see, eg, Richard Felder and Joni Spurlin, ‘Applications, Reliability and Validity of the Index of Learning Styles’ (2005) 21(1) International Journal of Engineering Education 103; David Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (1984). While some models of learning styles would distinguish active learners from passive learners and suggest that active learners prefer group work, we are more interested in the fact that a preference for group work also reflects a personal preference for social connectedness rather than competitiveness.
[6] Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA); Arts and Social sciences; Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM); Built Environment; College of Fine Arts (COFA); Commerce and Economics; Engineering; Law; Medicine; and Science.
[7] William Eaton et al, ‘Occupations and the Prevalence of Major Depressive Disorder’ (1990) 32 Journal of Occupational Medicine 1079, 1083; G Andrew Benjamin, Elaine Darling and Bruce Sales, ‘The Prevalence of Depression: Alcohol Abuse and Cocaine Abuse among United States Lawyers’ (1990) 13 International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 233, 240; Martin Seligman, Paul Verkuil and Terry Kang, ‘Why Lawyers are Unhappy’ [2005] DeakinLawRw 4; (2005) 10 Deakin Law Review 49, 54; Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness (2004) 177; see generally American Bar Association, At the Breaking Point: The Report of a National Conference on the Emerging Crisis in the Quality of Lawyers’ Health and Lives — Its Impact on Law Firms and Client Services (1991).
[8] Benjamin, Darling and Sales, above n 7, 243.
[9] Beaton Consulting, Annual Professions Survey 2007: Short Report (2007) 2; Norm Kelk et al, above n 4, 14, 42; Colin James, ‘Lawyer Dissatisfaction, Emotional Intelligence and Clinical Legal Education’ (2008) 18 Legal Education Review 123, 124.
[10] Beaton Consulting, above n 9, 2.
[11] Kelk et al, above n 4, 12.
[12] G Andrew Benjamin et al, ‘The Role of Legal Education in Producing Psychological Distress Among Law Students and Lawyers’ (1986) American Bar Foundation Research Journal 225, 240; Kennon M Sheldon and Lawrence S Krieger, ‘Does Legal Education Have Undermining Effects on Law Students? Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values and Well-Being’ (2004) 22 Behavioural Science & Law 261, 262; Kennon M Sheldon and Lawrence S Krieger, ‘Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test of Self-Determination Theory’ (2007) 33 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 833, 890–1.
[13] Eaton et al, above n 7; Benjamin, Darling and Sales, above n 7; Kelk et al, above, n 4; Ann Iijima, ‘Lessons Learned: Legal Education and Law Student Dysfunction’ (1998) 48(4) Journal of Legal Education 524, 526; Benjamin et al, above n 12, 241.
[14] See, inter alia, Lauren Alloy et al, ‘The Hopelessness Theory of Depression: Attributional Aspects’ (1988) 27 British Journal of Clinical Psychology 5, 21; Judy Garber and Martin Seligman (eds), Human Helplessness: Theory and Application (1980).
[15] Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in Ernest Jones (ed), Collected Papers (1950); Alice Miller, Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self (1996); Sidney Blatt, ‘Contributions of Psychoanalysis to the Understanding and Treatment of Depression’ (1998) 46(3) Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 723.
[16] Arnold Lazarus, ‘Learning Theory and the Treatment of Depression’ (1968) 6 Behavioural Research Therapy 83; Peter Lewinsohn and Julian Libet, ‘Pleasant Events, Activity Schedules and Depression’ (1972) 79 Journal of Abnormal Psychology 291; Arthur Staats and Elaine Heiby, ‘Paradigmatic Behaviourism’s Theory of Depression’ in Steven Reiss and Richard Bootzin (eds), Theoretical Issues in Behavioural Therapy (1985).
[17] Kennon Sheldon et al, ‘What is Satisfying about Satisfying Events? Testing 10 Candidate Psychological Needs’ (2001) 80 Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 325.
[18] The cultural composition of the UNSW student body is set out briefly above, n 2. There was no evidence to suggest systematic cultural or faculty-specific biases in the survey data.
[19] ‘Group of Eight’ (Go8) universities and their 2009 tertiary admission scores for law were: Adelaide (95.05), ANU (95), Sydney (99.55), Melbourne (no longer taking undergraduates), Queensland (95.80), UWA (96.3), UNSW (99.4), Monash (98.05). For comparison, UNE appeared to have one of the lowest (84.44) but UWS (94.70) and UTS (97.9) and Macquarie (96.3) also have comparable admission requirements to Go8 universities.
[20] For an excellent discussion on this topic, see Gerald Keller and Brian Warrack, Statistics for Management and Economics (5th ed, 2000) ch 16.
[21] For the present analysis, we restricted our attention to undergraduate students only (N = 2241), though the inclusion of postgraduate students (about 10 per cent of the total sample) does not significantly alter the results and conclusions discussed.
[22] A multinomial logit (MNL) model essentially performs separate logit regressions for each pair of outcome categories of the dependent variable. A logit is a model where the dependent variable assumes only two values, typically zero and one. This peculiarity, if not taken into account using particular estimation techniques, produces impossible or irrelevant predictions about the strength of association between dependent and independent variables. In our case, MNL estimates the probabilities of choosing each of the other five faculties in which data are organised (ie, Arts/Social Science, COFA, Commerce and Economics, Engineering, Medicine, Other) relative to choosing law. For a discussion of limited dependent variable models, see Jeffrey Wooldridge, Introductory Econometrics (1999) ch 17. For a discussion of MNL estimation, see A Colin Cameron and Pravin Trivedi, Microeconometrics: Methods and Applications (2005) ch 15.
[23] As respondents typically did not rank all the options available in questions asking them to rank several alternatives (eg, A and B), we had to deal with two types of problem in the empirical analysis: (1) missing data whenever a questionnaire was incomplete; and (2) a varied ‘density’ in the frequency of responses, especially when the ranks of the answers were low. To avoid carrying out regression analyses only on surveys for which we had the complete set of responses, we decided to adopt the following strategy. To deal with (1), we created categorical (dummy) variables for each alternative option: the categorical variables were assigned a value of zero if the answer was missing, and of one if the answer was chosen or ranked. To deal with (2), we created new categorical (binary) variables with a value of one if the respondent ranked that option as most, second-most or third-most important and zero otherwise. We preferred comparing answers that students see as relatively important (grouped together) to those ranked fourth or lower, rather than focusing on the nuances of their exact rank, which quickly rarefies for alternatives seen as unimportant. Both sets of dummies were used as independent variables in the regression analysis. Alternative strategies to deal with missing data were also considered (eg, replacing the missing values with each response’s average) and these yielded similar results. We believe that the approach followed is the least ‘intrusive’ in handling the data and hence preferable. Finally, for questions leading to only one choice among several alternatives (eg, question QQ ‘key influences in university decision’), we expanded the possible answers into a set of dummy variables, one for each possible choice, with one extra category for non-respondents.
[24] See Wooldridge, above n 22, 299.
[25] Eaton et al, above n 7; Paul Henry, ‘Life Stresses, Explanatory Style, Hopelessness and Occupational Class’ (2005) 12(3) International Journal of Stress Management 241, 243.
[26] Sheldon et al, above n 17.
[27] Seligman, above n 7, 179; Seligman, Verkuil and Kang, above n 7, 54–5; see generally Henry, above n 25.
[28] Lawrence S Krieger, ‘Institutional Denial about the Dark Side of Law School, and Fresh Empirical Guidance for Constructively Breaking the Silence’ (2002) 52 Journal of Legal Education 112, 119.
[29] Ibid.
[30] This is both a personal observation of one of the authors and a comment which has been made by a young solicitor member of the audience (typically juniors in very large law firms) in every one of the Annual Tristan Jepson Memorial Lectures held in Sydney for the last four years for the purpose of raising awareness of issues of mental illness, and particularly depression in the legal profession. See also Krieger, above n 28.
[31] Seligman, above n 7, 177.
[32] There is some evidence that the private returns to a law degree in Australia are amongst the highest across fields of study, and have risen in recent times. The additional earnings, adjusted for the probability of unemployment, have been estimated to be higher than 30 per cent for each year in law education relative to half as much for business education. See, eg, Philip Lewis, Anne Daly and Don Fleming, Investing in a Legal Education: The Private Rate of Return to a Law Degree (Curtin Business School Centre for Labour Market Research Discussion Paper Series 03/1, 2003) 7.
[33] Keith L Williams and Renee V Galliher, ‘Predicting Depression and Self-Esteem from Social Connectedness, Support and Competence’ (2006) 15(8) Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 855, 858; Richard Lee and Steven Robbins, ‘The Relationship between Social Connectedness and Anxiety, Self Esteem and Social Identity’ (1998) 45 Journal of Counseling Psychology 338, 343.
[34] Kenneth Rice et al, ‘Perfectionism, Stress and Social (Dis)Connection’ (2006) 53(4) Journal of Counseling Psychology 524, 524.
[35] Robert Hill et al, ‘Perfectionism and Interpersonal Problems’ (1997) 69(1) Journal of Personality Assessment 81; Kenneth Rice and Daniel Lapsley, ‘Perfectionism, Coping and Emotional Adjustment’ (2001) 42 Journal of College Student Development 157.
[36] See generally Tracy Cross, Karen Gust-Brey and P Bonny Ball, ‘A Psychological Autopsy of the Suicide of an Academically Gifted Student’ (2002) 46 Gifted Child Quarterly 247; Rice et al, above n 34, 524.
[37] Williams and Galliher, above n 33; Lee and Robbins, above n 33.
[38] Consider in this context the English tradition of eating dinner at the Inns of Court as part of the training of the barrister.
[39] Benjamin et al, above n 12, 240; Sheldon and Krieger, ‘Does Legal Education Have Undermining Effects on Law Students? Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values and Well-Being’, above n 12, 262; Sheldon and Krieger, ‘Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test of Self-Determination Theory’, above n 12, 890–1.