Reports of sexual violence should be written from a public health perspective approach to appropriately frame the occurrence and encourage accurate understandings of sexual assault as a larger societal issue. This research consists of two studies to investigate the way universities do (and should) communicate about sexual violence with their students. For Study 1, interviews were conducted with a random sample of public state Universities regarding their emergency alert processes and template usage to determine current emergency communication practices. The majority of universities contacted do not have a template or best practice guidelines in place for creating timely warnings. For Study 2, an experimental test asked participants to read a hypothetical university timely warning message about a sexual assault on campus and take a post-test survey about their perceptions of sexual assault and personal estimation of threat. The experiment tested whether the inclusion of contextualizing statistics and information in the message changed their reported perceptions of rape overall. Results from the study show that a combination approach incorporating both statistics and personal safety strategies had the greatest influence on both threat perception and reported preventative behaviors. This research has significant public policy implications for best practices concerning institutional communication about sexual assault.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-04022015-161420 |
| Date | 13 April 2015 |
| Creators | Hesson, Ashley |
| Contributors | Mann, Christopher, Miller, Andrea, Windels, Kasey |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04022015-161420/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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