Rape myth acceptance in college students

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between variables that may be related to rape myth acceptance in college students. Identifying variables that may be related to rape myth acceptance is essential for improving rape prevention programming. The setting chosen to examine these variables consisted of 349 students enrolled in undergraduate courses at a mid-size, Midwestern University. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to examine the relationship between gender, year in school, previous participation in rape prevention programming, knowing a victim and/or past experiences of sexual victimization, and knowing a perpetrator and/or perpetration with rape myth acceptance. Personality constructs were utilized as covariates due to their expected influence on the dependent variable. Overall, only Openness to Experience significantly correlated with rape myth acceptance and the effect size was small.Results indicated a significant 2-way interaction for gender and year in school. The interaction revealed that at freshmen year, men showed much higher rape myth acceptance than women. Rape myth acceptance in men declined from freshmen year to senior year, but consistently remained higher than women. Rape myth acceptance in women only slightly decreased between freshmen and sophomore year, yet were significantly lower from freshmen to senior year. Although a significant interaction between gender and year in school was found, the interaction was ordinal making the main effects interpretable. In fact, results indicated a significant main effect for both gender and year in school. Specifically, men report higher rape myth acceptance than women. Also, acceptance of rape myths decreased as year in school increased. Implications of these findings and future directions for research are discussed.Department of Educational PsychologyThesis (Ph. D.