Everyday Problems and Legal Need: The Public Understanding of Law Survey (PULS) Volume 1

The Public Understanding of Law Survey (PULS) is ground-breaking research to help us better understand legal capability, attitudes and experience of the law in the Victorian community. 

The PULS is a large-scale face-to-face survey exploring how people understand, experience and navigate law and everyday life problems with a legal dimension (‘justiciable’ problems). It is made up of a predominantly face-to-face sample of 6,008 respondents across Victoria employing the best survey methods available to yield the highest quality data. 

This report is the first of three volumes. It explores legal need in Victoria, how justiciable problems are experienced, what people do about them and how they progress and conclude.  

The second volume of the PULS report provides an overview of levels of a range of different dimensions of legal capability across the Victorian population. It also explores the sociodemographic factors associated with different levels of legal capability.

The third volume of the PULS report draws upon the full PULS survey dataset to investigate more fully the drivers of problem resolving behaviour and problem outcomes, by incorporating the new legal capability measures into the statistical models of problem resolving behaviour and outcome reported in this volume.