175 9. Studying Discriminatory Practices in Youth Justice Decision-making Olga Petintseva Abstract Discriminatory practices in youth justice decision-making are central in numerous empirical studies. In this contribution I identify two ways in which this topic is approached and discuss their implications. he irst approach prioritizes (discriminatory) decision outcomes (e.g. harsher punishment of ethnic minorities). he second approach focuses on the decision-making process. Ater an introduction to both models, their application in the Belgian research tradition is discussed. Given the current youth justice model, the (statistical) invisibility of some groups of youths and the analytic possibilities ofered by process-centred approach, I discuss the advantages of its applications. Such a perspective allows researchers to chart the complexity of information circularity and decision-making within particular institutional contexts. Furthermore, the process focus creates space for the study of subtly harmful processes, without limiting the discussion to narrow understandings of ‘discrimination’. Identifying Two Approaches in Studies of Discriminatory Processes hroughout Judicial Decision-making: an Introduction Studying decision-making (whether one aims to understand what is going on or to assess the legitimacy of judicial decisions) is challenging as such because of numerous conceptual and methodological issues (competing penal paradigms, institutional complexities, diferent factors and actors involved in judicial trajectories, diiculties with untangling of perceptions, attitudes, assessments and actual decisions, access issues, limitations of the available data, etc.). his is even more so in youth justice, given the It's For Your Own Good.indd 175 14/07/15 19:51