The Importance of Recurring Campus Surveys of Interpersonal Violence: An Analysis of Period and Cohort Effects

ABSTRACT

Assessing change in campus interpersonal violence over time is an important step to understand the nature and prevalence of students’ victimization experiences. Using a repeated cross-sectional campus survey of interpersonal violence from a large southern university, this article tracks the change of students’ victimization experiences over a three-year period for two identified undergraduate student cohorts and offers empirical evidence to determine the best time in a college student’s career to initially launch a campus interpersonal violence survey and how often such data should be collected. Controlling for demographic characteristics, the results indicate that both administration-year-effect and cohort-effect exist. The results further suggest that yearly campus interpersonal violence surveys would be most beneficial to track campus interpersonal violence change.

KEYWORDS:

• Campus survey
• interpersonal violence
• cohort effect
• administration year

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Office of the President at the University of Kentucky for support of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

Prior to starting the study, ethical approval has been obtained for all protocols from the local institutional review board (IRB) at the University of Kentucky.

Informed consent

Informed written consent has been obtained from the participants.

Data availability of statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chenghui Zhang

Chenghui Zhang, Ph.D., LL.M., is a Research Assistant for the Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the at the University of Kentucky and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Caihong R. Li

Caihong R. Li, Ph.D., is the Statistician working at the Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky.

Diane R. Follingstad

Diane R. Follingstad, Ph.D., ABPP, is the Executive Director and Women’s Circle Endowed Chair of the Center for Research on Violence Against Women and a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Kentucky.

Jaspreet K. Chahal

Jaspreet K. Chahal, M.S., is the Research Project Manager for the Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky.