M- g o v e r nme n t f o r c o u r t s s y s t ems Linda Rau from Kila Kila Village Court, near Port Moresby, taking part in training to become a village court magistrate. Australia has funded the training of 1,000 female magistrates Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade CC BY 2.0 Commonwealth Governance Handbook 2014/15 35 make an informed assessment as to whether or not they wanted to participate and consent was registered using audio recordings of the interviews. The identities of clerks who participated in the trial have been kept anonymous in all reporting. Participating clerks The Magisterial Service indicated that there are 54 district courts throughout PNG and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville that deal with village court matters. Of these, 39 clerks at 39 district courts completed over-the-phone training for the SMS trial. The gender breakdown was essentially even, with 20 female clerks and 19 male clerks participating in the project. All of the 39 participating clerks owned or had access to a mobile phone. Of these, more than a third had basic phones with limited functionality (15 out of 39), nearly half had an advanced phone with a camera (19), very few owned smartphones with internet access (four) and one was using a desktop mobile phone to participate in the trial. Most phones were in reasonable working order. The majority of clerks were familiar with writing and reading text messages on the phone used during the trial (34 out of 39), and most had access to mains electricity to recharge their mobile phone handset batteries, however, five clerks needed to pay each time their battery ran down. Most clerks were happy with the quality and reliability of the mobile phone network coverage available at their workplace. When it came to other communication media, just under a third of clerks had access to email (11 out of 39), slightly more than half had access to a serviceable fax machine (22), roughly half had a landline telephone available at the district court building (20) and the majority were within a reasonable distance from a post office (37 out of 39). Results Clerks were categorised non-active, semi-active or active based on the frequency and type of text message responses they gave during the two-month-long trial. Figure 1 shows that most of the 39 clerks sent at least some response. Structured interviews were conducted over the phone immediately after the data collection period ended. When questioned about the difficulty of responding to SMS questions, the majority of clerks taking part in the interviews (28) reported that they found the task easy (89.3 per cent said it was easy, 10.7 per cent chose a ‘medium’ level of difficulty and no-one classified the experience as difficult). Regarding the timeliness of the process, more than half of the respondents stated that they found the process to be quick, while some thought it was time-consuming (53.6 per cent of respondents found the process quick, 39.3 per cent found it to be taking a middling amount of time and 7.1 per cent found the process to be time-consuming). When given options for submitting the data, SMS emerged as the preferred option, however, the majority of respondents with access to a networked database preferred to use the computers available rather than SMS, fax or post.
CEP template 2012
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