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January 01 2002

Supporting Accountability in the Field of Mediation

Margaret S. Herrman,

Margaret S. Herrman

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

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Nancy Hollett,

Nancy Hollett

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

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Dawn Goettler Eaker,

Dawn Goettler Eaker

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

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Jerry Gale,

Jerry Gale

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

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Mark Foster

Mark Foster

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

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Author and Article Information

Margaret S. Herrman

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

Nancy Hollett

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

Dawn Goettler Eaker

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

Jerry Gale

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

Mark Foster

Margaret S. Herrman, Nancy Hollett, Dawn Goettler Eaker, Jerry Gale, and Mark Foster have all worked on The Mediator Skills Project, a research effort based at the Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. 30602. Brief biographies of the five coauthors appear as an unnumbered note at the end of this article.

First Publication: July 02 2007

Online ISSN: 1571-9979

Print ISSN: 0748-4526

© 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation

2002

Plenum Publishing Corporation

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.

Negotiation Journal (2002) 18 (1): 29–49.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1571-9979.2002.tb00249.x

Abstract

Over time, many fields of work—law, medicine, and teaching—matured from informal bodies of knowledge and skills, passed from one practitioner to another, into professions. In the process each began enumerating and affirming their intellectual and practical roots. Each also began testing practitioners to insure comprehension of relevant knowledge and an ability to demonstrate relevant skills. Family mediators in Canada have moved in this direction. In the United States, people who mediate interpersonal disputes also feel pressured to take additional steps to assure the quality of our work. This article summarizes what mediation organizations in the United States have done and could do to vouch for work in our field. But, taking additional steps calls for a clearer understanding of what a mediator should know and what they are expected to do. These two critical pieces of information remain nebulous. So, this article goes beyond describing ways of insuring accountability by also describing a recently completed job analysis, a tool frequently used in other fields of work to describe the skills and knowledge relevant to a particular job.

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© 2002 Plenum Publishing Corporation

2002

Plenum Publishing Corporation

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.