Fairness in Construction Arbitration

In this data, we present excerpts of participants' responses on their perception of fairness in construction arbitration. Based on the organizational justice theories and a qualitative study of five exemplifying cases in Kenya, we asked thirteen participants a series of questions to canvas their perceptions of fairness in the cases in which they had participated. These thirteen participants included two arbitrators, three parties and eight party representatives who willingly shared documents from their case files and also responded to our pre-structured questions as contained in our interview guide. We collected textual data not only on award favourability and perception of distributive, procedural and interactional justice as components of organisational justice but also on subjective aspects of the quality of the award that depict disputants' cooperative behaviour. These aspects include their acceptance of the award, extent to which arbitration maintained business relations and willingness to refer future disputes to arbitration. Interpretation of the data is limited only to the five cases studied, whose claim and counterclaim values ranged from less than Kenya Shilings 50 million to more than Kenya Shillings 350 million. Unfortunately, we cannot reveal the names of the cases and the names of the participants, whose details have been code-named. Thus, the five cases are code-named Case 1-5, while participants are code-named AB, CM, CR, RS and RR for the arbitrators, claimants, claimants' representatives, respondent and respondents' representatives, respectively.