A Public Health Perspective on Campus Initiatives Against Sexual Violence

With the public health model of violence prevention as a lens, this Undergraduate Research Scholarship project utilized a statistical analysis to determine whether a relationship could be established between number of sexual violence prevention initiatives on a university campus and proportion of students who have experienced nonconsensual sexual contact.Using a public health framework, this project aims to address the question, “How does quantity of university prevention initiatives correlate with rates of campus sexual violence, including harassment, assault, and rape?”. Using the results of the 2019 Association of American Universities Campus Climate Survey and publicly available information regarding individual university trainings and programs (collected using defined search terms), hypothesis testing was conducted to determine whether the existence of a linear relationship could be established between the explanatory variable of number of initiatives and the response variable of proportion of students experiencing sexual violence. Using a scatterplot, a point estimate regression line was created with formula ŷ = .129946 + 0.004992x and p-value of 0.3071, from which it was determined that there was not enough evidence to establish a correlation between these two variables at the 0.05 significance level.This research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)