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Recognizing the continuum of opportunities for third parties to prevent and respond to sexual assault and dating violence on a college campus

Crime Prevention and Community Safety Aims and scope

Abstract

A framework proposed by McMahon and Banyard outlines the opportunities college students have to engage in prosocial helping behaviors before, during or after an incident of sexual assault or dating abuse. To build on this framework, this study (i) used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to test the proposed framework and (ii) examined the correlates associated with student behaviors along a continuum of opportunities to prevent or respond to these types of crimes in a college setting. The structural equation model results demonstrated that there are different factors associated with whether students engaged in behaviors to prevent sexual assault or dating abuse, whether they engaged in prosocial behaviors after an incident of violence or whether they intervened in risky situations involving alcohol. Observing others engage in similar prosocial behaviors was the most consistent predictor. Past victimization and respondent sex were also associated with different types of interventions. Practical implications of these findings are addressed.

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Notes

  1. This scale was reduced by the instrument’s authors (Coker et al, 2011) to minimize the length of the survey.

  2. General guidelines for model fit are a relatively low χ2 that is not statistically significant; RMSEA⩽0.05, TLI>0.95, CFI>0.95 and for CFA models, WRMR<0.90 (see Brown, 2006). Although the χ2 is considered the ‘classic goodness-of-fit index’, it is not reported because of many criticisms (Brown, 2006).

  3. These adjustments were made to avoid biased parameter estimates and incorrect standard errors (Davey and Salva, 2010).

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Palmer, J. Recognizing the continuum of opportunities for third parties to prevent and respond to sexual assault and dating violence on a college campus. Crime Prev Community Saf 18, 1–18 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpcs.2015.18

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