The Center for Families, Children & the Courts has been collecting data on court-based child custody mediation in California since 1991. This particular report presents the results of the Parent Viewpoint survey from 1999.

For this study, parents in 2,812 mediation sessions were asked to respond to questions on four dimensions of the mediation: process issues, helpfulness, focus on children, and session dynamics. On each of the four dimensions, an average of more than 80% of parents responded positively. Relationships were found between responses and a number of variables, including the number of issues raised by parents, whether the parents were represented by counsel, income, marital status, and parental role, although variations were small.