Background

Selection tests based on these writings have been used in many places, beginning with labor mediators in Wisconsin and court-connected mediators in the Boston courts, and later extended to such large-scale systems as an internal employee mediation program at United Airlines and the mediator accreditation program of the Law Society of New South Wales, Australia. Selection tests, however, are not the only use of this type of analysis of mediation skill. Variations on the resulting sets of evaluation scales have been adapted for training and other purposes in many and varied settings — e.g. in a State of Pennsylvania program handling special education disputes, in the National Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, and in a World Bank-financed reform effort for the court system of Russia.

The origins of the train of thinking represented in all of these reports are in Five Elements of Mediation and On Evaluating Mediators. For program administrators and scholars, the key report here (because it assessed the impact of most of the others, and made adjustments) is Performance-Based Assessment–A Methodology. The remaining publications on this page describe a variety of uses of the underlying approach. But if you are an attorney or business executive who just needs to pick a mediator for one case, we recommend that you start with the Consumer Guide. It’s a free booklet prepared by the Alaska Judicial Council as a lay person’s guide to the issues discussed in the Methodology.

Notes on selected writings

Skill Is Not Enough: This 2004 Negotiation Journal article by Chris Honeyman, Bee Chen Goh and Loretta Kelly compares mediation in Chinese-Malaysian and Aboriginal Australian villages with mediation in the US court system, and finds surprising similarities. (Yes, really.) What’s more, the similarities explain something that has puzzled students of mediation for decades.

Finding And Hiring Quality Neutrals: This 1996 publication is still surprisingly relevant. It features an in-depth examination of many of the most difficult issues facing mediators and dispute resolution program managers in federal agencies. With Chris Honeyman, Charles Pou, Jr., and ten other contributors, it was originally published by the U.S. EPA and seven other federal and state agencies. At approx. 70 pages, this document is most easily read in printed form.

Credentialing Approaches: The slow movement toward skills-based testing continues: This short 2001 article by law professor Ellen Waldman assesses the then “state of the art” of efforts to guarantee quality of mediation services. It appeared in Dispute Resolution Magazine, Fall 2001 (American Bar Association, Section of Dispute Resolution; Vol. 8, No. 1) and is reproduced here by permission.

“…In 1988 mediator Chris Honeyman began the first effort to isolate the particular skills required for effective mediation….Honeyman’s test was not designed as a one-size-fits-all invention, but as a flexible instrument that programs could modify to fit their particular needs.”  From Waldman, E. (2001) “Credentialing Approaches…”

Performance-Based Assessment – A Methodology

The publication of Performance-Based Assessment: A Methodology completed the 1990-95 Test Design Project, a national effort to improve competency testing in dispute resolution. The Methodology remains the most thorough available document on the technology of quality control in mediation.