As the national conversation about campus sexual assault escalates, so has the idea of using “climate surveys” to help combat it.
Gauging students’ experiences and perceptions can inform colleges of common problems and how often they occur, guiding efforts to prevent and respond to sexual violence. That is the thinking behind surveys’ recent attention, including as a major recommendation last month by the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
A legislator in Maryland proposed a bill last year requiring campuses to administer surveys and report results, and Rep. Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, announced plans last month for a similar measure in the U.S. House of Representatives. Several U.S. senators have expressed interest in anonymous, standardized campus surveys, while federal agencies have compelled colleges to administer them in recent settlements of investigations under the gender-equity law known as Title IX.
Sexual assaults usually go unreported. Only 12 percent of victims come forward, according to a recent White House report, which can leave college officials unaware of how often such assaults take place. Survey data, experts and advocates agree, is an important first step to help colleges understand the problem and work to solve it.
“If the whole idea behind Title IX is to be able to address systemic climate issues, we can’t do that unless we know what they are,” says Brett A. Sokolow, chief executive of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, a consulting and law firm that advises colleges. “We can’t assume what they are, because we may not be accurate.”
Colleges already collect and report crime data under federal law, but because of underreporting of sexual assault, survey results may better reflect reality, says Nancy Chi Cantalupo, a research fellow at the Victim Rights Law Center and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University. Some supporters of surveys say simply administering them creates a safer culture: It elevates awareness and gets people talking.
The White House task force has called on colleges to conduct surveys as early as next year, and it released a 37-page guide on how best to phrase questions, generate responses, and publish results. The task force plans to work with Rutgers University’s Center on Violence Against Women and Children to craft, test, and eventually release a survey that White House officials said could become mandatory on all campuses by 2016. (The three military-service academies have been required by Congress to conduct similar annual surveys since the 2005-6 academic year.)
But some administrators aren’t so sure surveys will help. The root of the problem is underreporting, and surveys won’t necessarily encourage more students to come forward, says Deb Moriarty, vice president for student affairs at Towson University.
“We already know the extent of the problem,” Ms. Moriarty says, citing national data. And many campuses collect sexual-health information, she points out, by surveying students through the American College Health Association. She doubts that anonymous climate surveys would generate reliable data and argues that colleges should instead direct resources into prevention and education programs.
At a legislative hearing in January, Ms. Moriarty testified against the Maryland bill on behalf of the University System of Maryland. “It seems like an oversimplified solution,” she says, “to a very complex problem.”
A Longstanding Model
The University of New Hampshire has been asking students about “unwanted sexual experiences” for more than 25 years, since a rape in a dormitory prompted research by four professors. Was this an isolated incident, or something that occurred regularly but went unseen?
Among the concerned faculty was Sally Ward, a professor of sociology. Because of underreporting, they did not think it was useful to rely on crime statistics, she says, so they created a survey to measure students’ experiences with, attitudes about, and knowledge of sexual assault. The incidence was alarming, she says: “We thought it was a problem on campus.” With the data collected, the researchers urged the university to devote more resources to prevention.
After that first survey—administered in randomly selected classrooms in 1988—the university polled students again in 2000, and every six years since. That frequency lets researchers examine trends over time, says Ms. Ward, but doesn’t oversaturate the campus. In 2006, the university added an online component. And in 2012, 40 percent of undergraduates, or 4,406 of them, responded to the 70-question survey.
To avoid labels with varying interpretations, the survey excludes such terms as “rape” and “sexual assault,” instead asking, for instance, “During this school year, how many times has someone had sexual contact with you when you didn’t want to?” Core questions have remained the same to allow for comparison, while new questions have been added. One seeks to measure, for example, stalking and intimate-partner violence, reflecting categories that federal law recently began requiring colleges to include in annual crime reports.
Last year, when the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice settled a high-profile investigation of sexual assaults at the University of Montana at Missoula, the binding agreement laid out many requirements of the university, including that it conduct a regular climate survey. Christine Fiore, an associate professor of psychology at Montana charged with designing the survey, turned to the University of New Hampshire for advice.
Ms. Fiore examined other research instruments, too, including the psychologist Mary P. Koss’s Sexual Experiences Survey (the gold standard, Ms. Fiore says) and the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale, which measures how misperceptions of rape influence the term’s cultural meaning.
Montana conducted its first survey this past fall and plans to administer two more, one this fall and another in 2015. After that, Ms. Fiore says, the university will most likely administer a survey once every three years.
“We want to know how we are doing in terms of the population we are trying to serve,” says Lucy France, general counsel at Montana. “I can sit here in my office and think about what I think needs to be done, but we want to find out and get feedback from the students themselves.”
Montana’s and New Hampshire’s surveys are both voluntary. And because students are already heavily surveyed, the universities have offered incentives, such as entering respondents in a raffle for Amazon gift cards. Nearly 2,700 students responded to Montana’s first survey, surpassing Ms. Fiore’s goal of 2,500.
She believes strongly that the surveys should be voluntary, as they can take up to 40 minutes to complete and ask difficult questions about sexual experiences and relationships.
But some advocates feel otherwise. “Having it be mandated gives you the entire spectrum of the experience,” says Tucker Reed, a self-described sexual-assault survivor who, with other students, filed a federal complaint against the University of Southern California last year. The 100-page complaint says the university mishandled the students’ cases in violation of Title IX. It also includes findings from a student group’s climate survey and recommends that the Education Department require the university to administer a regular sexual-experiences survey.
“Why are they not doing this everywhere?” Ms. Reed says. “This helped us so much.”
Students at Princeton University have also been eager to learn more about their peers’ experiences. When the campus newspaper there recently found that the results of a 2008 survey had not been published, students petitioned the administration to conduct another one.
Using Data
If administering climate surveys is one step in combating sexual assault on campuses, using the data effectively is another.
“There’s so much of it,” says Ms. Fiore, who is still sifting through the results of Montana’s first survey. Most victims, she has found, opt to tell close friends about assaults rather than reporting them formally to authorities. In interpreting the data, her goal is to improve education programs to dispel myths and confusion surrounding sexual assault.
The University of New Hampshire publishes and distributes the results of each survey to its campus community. The findings have led to the expansion of the Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention Program and to closer ties between prevention educators and campus police officers. And the university’s violence-studies researchers have received outside grants to conduct further studies and training.
The researchers at New Hampshire have been able not only to determine the scope and dynamics of the problems on their campus, says Ms. Cantalupo, of the Victim Rights Law Center, but also “assess the quality and effectiveness of different responses they’ve adopted to the violence.”
Ms. Ward, the sociology professor at New Hampshire, says findings there don’t necessarily reflect the reality on other campuses. Colleges and student populations differ widely, she says: rural and urban, residential and commuter. And questions should be customized to a certain degree, Ms. Fiore says, to generate relevant responses.
In its recommendations last month, the White House task force offered 15 pages of sample survey questions for colleges to either use or adapt. But some advocates argue that survey design should be up to Education Department officials, not colleges.
“It should not be left to schools,” says Laura L. Dunn, a law student at the University of Maryland at Baltimore and a leader in the movement against campus sexual assault. “It has to actually be a proper victimization survey,” she says. “Educational agencies should be assisting them in this.”
The more information colleges and students have, the better, proponents of surveys say. As expectations rise for colleges to improve their response to and prevent sexual assault, they may need to try new strategies and show results. If they don’t decide to conduct surveys themselves, they may see new laws that compel them to.
