Sexual assault on college campuses is a public health problem that most recently has come to national attention with the formation of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault in 2014. In addition, in 2008 the American College Health Association’s Position Statement on Preventing Sexual Violence on College and University Campuses called for campuses to take action with regard to sexual violence prevention. While many school-based educational intervention programs to prevent sexual assault exist, few have demonstrated empirical support in college settings. A recent review identified that 92% of 4-year public universities and 75% of 4-year private non-profit universities offer primary prevention programs, many of which are not currently represented in the literature. Given that there is limited evidence for effective sexual assault prevention programming and campuses have developed their own educational strategies outside of these effective programs, additional data are needed to evaluate current campus-based educational practices in order to inform new strategies or enhancements to existing programs.
Stemming from this need for increased evaluation of current practices and development of new strategies/enhancements to existing programs, the current project included two aims:
Aim 1: Conduct secondary data analysis of the longitudinal effects of University of Michigan’s (UM) current sexual assault prevention program, Relationship Remix, to determine whether the program produces meaningful changes in knowledge, skills, and intentions at the individual level.
Aim 2: Use a participatory research framework to conduct focus groups/interviews with UM students to inform how to best develop and/or adapt prevention programming for this campus setting.