The lab maintains the following three active and complementary research projects:
Sexual Misconduct Prevention Programming: Evaluation & Assessment Analysis
This longitudinal project coordinates the evaluation and assessment of sexual misconduct prevention programming at Lafayette College. The project’s primary objective is to track and analyze evaluation and assessment data over time to support evidence-based sexual misconduct training and prevention programming that leads to a campus culture free of sexual assault, relationship violence, stalking and harassment. The lab provides analysis support for the Peer Anti-Violence Educators (PAVE) program, which delivers prevention workshops to first year students, residence halls, athletic teams, fraternities and sororities, as well as student organizations. The lab partners with the Student Advocacy and Prevention Coordinator, who also oversees the PAVE program and assists with data collection for this project.
The Harm Mapping Project
The Harm Mapping Project examines the geography of gender-based violence on campus with the goals of 1) better understanding the spaces and places that students have experienced gender-based harms and/or feel vulnerable to experiencing such harms, and 2) providing recommendations to campus leadership regarding ways to modify the built environment to help prevent future harms from occurring. To date, sexual and gender-based violence prevention scholarship has primarily focused on preventing sexual and gender-based violence through bystander intervention educational programming and/or alcohol and other drug awareness programming. This project contributes to a growing body of prevention literature that is focused on the geographies of harm and how the built environment contributes to enabling harm to occur (see Mahoney et al 2022; Meredith et al 2020).
Click here to view a public presentation of Phase I of the Harm Mapping Project.
The Impact of Institutional Responses on Unwanted Sexual Experiences on Campus: A Longitudinal Study
This longitudinal, online project seeks to assess potential changes in students’ perceptions of institutional betrayal (or support) following an unwanted sexual experience on campus. This project will also assess psychological reactions (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, depression symptoms) following unwanted sexual experiences that occur on campus, and to examine the possible interactions among perceived institutional betrayal (or support), unwanted sexual experiences, and subsequent psychological reactions. A recruitment email explaining the nature of the study was emailed to all first-year (class of 2027) students in August 2023. 151 students completed the first time point (i.e., “Time 1”). Students who participated in Time 1 were asked to complete the Time 2 survey at the end of the Spring 2024 semester, the Time 3 survey at the end of the Spring 2025 semester, the Time 4 survey at the end of the Spring 2026 semester, and the final Time 5 survey at the end of the Spring 2027 semester.