A Sexual Assault Campus Climate Survey: Challenges in Development and Implementation

In January 2014, the White House established a Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, with a mandate to provide colleges/universities with tools to increase understanding of the true depth of the sexual assault problem on campuses and increase opportunity for victims to report crimes.  The White House is exploring legislative/administrative options to require colleges to conduct evidence-based surveys beginning in 2016.  With a commitment and responsiveness to national and local sexual assault prevention movements, one major Northeastern public university created a campus-wide survey to be pilot-tested in spring 2015.  This project represents a unique collaboration of senior level administrators, residence life staff, public health faculty, an IRB member, and students.  The university’s national reputation of expansive resources for LGBTQ students, and strong mission focused on social justice, provided the context for a survey addressing a range of issues beyond prevalence of sexual assault.  Researching high-risk topics on a wide scale presented unique design and implementation challenges: sampling across campus, response rates, and appropriate incentives; multi-phase data collection; choosing appropriate language (e.g. girls, females, women); defining assault, rape, consent, harassment; balancing invasiveness and ability to accurately measure experiences and perspectives;  and differentiating beliefs about campus responsiveness to assault vs. prevention. Presentation will focus on one campus’s success in developing an instrument assessing a range of issues in reaching the White House’s goal of reducing sexual assault and harassment on college campuses.  Pilot test data, to be collected Spring 2015, will be presented in the context of these design issues.