The Victim's Right to Intervene as an Injured Party in Criminal Proceedings: A Multidimensional and Interdisciplinary Assessment of Current Dutch Legal Practice

Abstract

In order to further crime victims’ compensation, the Dutch legislator relatively recently extended the admissibility criterion. Since 2010, the key lies in the assessment of whether such a claim presents an undue burden for the criminal proceedings (S. 51f DCCP). In order to learn whether this legal change has been effective, an evaluative research was carried out containing both legal theoretical and empirical research (quantitative and qualitative). This called for an accurate research design in which classic legal research methods need to be combined with methods applied in social sciences. To counter this methodological challenge, we opted for a mix of research-design methods, using triangulation as the key to enable us to analyze the ‘law in action’. Our approach turned out to be fruitful, although not without methodological hazards. The paper contains a report on our ‘methodological journey’, providing an account of the difficulties that we encountered during the execution of our mixed research methods. The aim of the paper is only modest: we want to report on ‘the lessons learned’, endorsing the fact that triangulation is an appropriate approach for an interdisciplinary assessment of Dutch legal practice.

Keywords: triangulation, mixed research methods, interdisciplinary research, empirical-based legal research, crime victim's compensation