한국의 실증적 양형연구의 과거와 미래

Lee(1988)' empirical sentencing study “critical factors in empirical sentencing decision” was an important turning point for sentencing research in that it used more objective and scientific multivariate methods. Since then, almost ten empirical studies on sentencing have been conducted for last 20 years and found that there exists various types of discriminations in Korea court decisions. However, many studies still reported that legal factors (i.e., type of crime, prior record, consent between victim and offender) were most important independent variables in sentencing decision. Despite of research development in sentencing, generalization previous research findings to entire Korea Judicature may be still premature because there are few researches with small sample size and most studies are conducted mainly in Seoul. It is necessary that more studies should be more conducted to fully understand sentencing decisions. Considering previous empirical development on sentencing research, two requirements are important to improve sentencing research for future. First, a research environment should be changed to more friendly way. The Korea Judicature should collect wide range data and allow sentencing scholars to assess data and study various problems in criminal justice system. Second, scholars should improve the internal and external validity on future empirical study. Especially, it is necessary for researchers to (1) use proper statistical method for dependent variable (2) check the multicollinearity, (3) consider the problem of sample selection bias, (4) develop a theory, (5) reconsider Beta for logistic regression.