Lebanon Valley Sexual Assault Case Study

Summary With the increase of sexual assault occurring on college campuses across the United States, researchers Stiffin, Phillips, Weldon, and Feld set out to assess Lebanon Valley College, a small, liberal arts campus, and gauge the school’s level of readiness to establish a sexual assault prevention program on campus. In order to help a campus address its issue of sexual assault, it is best to establish the campus’ overall level of awareness. To grade the responses of the survey, the researchers used the Campus Readiness Assessment which was designed by the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape (PCAR). After looking into various studies that covered the risk factors, level of campus involvement, campus climates, and previous prevention efforts, PCAR sought to yield such violent behavior and created this assessment which aims to “build readiness and empower college communities to create unique solutions to the problem of sexual assault on campus” (Stiffin, 2014, p. 36). Therefore, the goal of the study at Lebanon Valley was to utilize the results from a sample and implement prevention programs based on the level of awareness shown by participants. …show more content…
There were nine participants coming from Lebanon Valley College’s stakeholders which consisted of: four students, two faculty, two staff, and one administrator. Researchers made sure to adhere to the code of ethics by providing a statement of informed consent. As mentioned, the assessment consisted of open ended questions that each lasted approximately one hour. The questions were divided into five sections to match the five measurements of readiness according to PCAR. The interview transcripts were keyed using a 1-9 rating scale with 1 = no awareness and 9 = a high level of awareness; the ratings for each section determined the overall readiness of the