NC State will administer a new survey this fall that will collect information and opinions from graduate and undergraduate students about the campus climate as it relates to sexual assault, according to Amy Circosta, interim vice provost of the Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity.
NC State’s Campus Climate Surveys have dealt with sexual violence-related questions in the past, but they are only conducted every five years and they cover a wide range of topics.
Circosta said in an email that these surveys were used to assess the university’s outreach, prevention and response initiatives related to sexual violence, but they needed to be updated to provide greater accuracy.
“Unfortunately, the response rate for the most recent Student Climate Survey was lower than expected, which makes the data less reliable,” Circosta said.
The new survey will be based on the Campus Climate Survey Validation Study, which coincided with the launch of the It’s On Us campaign laid out by the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault in 2014.
NC State’s Title IX Team officers and the Office for Institutional Research and Planning are currently reviewing various questionnaires that have been developed and tested by experts in the field to determine the best practices in administering such a survey, according to Circosta.
The current projection is that the new survey will be conducted every two or three years, a timeline that the Student Senate felt was still too infrequent to collect sufficient data on sexual assault. The most recent survey, conducted in spring 2015, dealt primarily with the respect between students and between students and faculty, according to a presentation given by Nancy Whelchel, associate director for survey research for the Office of Institutional Research and Planning, on March 28.
The previous model for the Campus Climate Survey had low participation, which made the data insufficient. This sparked Student Senate to pass the Sexual Assault Climate Act on April 6 in a unanimous vote, calling on the university to reevaluate its efforts to combat sexual assault on campus.
The bill addresses the lack of attention that the university administration, and subsequently the student body, has paid to the issue of sexual assault in the past, despite the recent adoption of the national It’s On Us campaign in November 2014. It also urges the university to optimize its efforts to confront the issue of sexual assault by using the resources made available by the White House Task Force.
The solution put forth in the bill is to conduct the comprehensive survey every semester. Ian Grice, public affairs director for WKNC and a supporter of the bill, said he hopes the bill will encourage the Title IX Team to conduct the new survey more often in the hopes that students will be able to see the results of the survey during their time on campus and hold the university accountable.
“I think the biggest problem with [the old survey] is the time,” Grice said. “It was every five years so students don’t see the change that happens because the students that participate in the survey will be graduated by the time new data is collected. Is the campus getting better or worse?”
According to University Police statistics, there were six cases of “forcible sex offenses” on NC State’s campus in 2012 and 2013. Both 2014 and 2015 had five rape reports each.
Twenty-seven universities in the United States have adopted more robust surveys of campus climate based on the White House Task Force’s recommendations, including UNC-Chapel Hill, according to Grice.
“Chapel Hill knows their sexual assault numbers on their campus whereas we don’t, and that shouldn’t be the case,” Grice said.
The benefits of an effective survey, according to the bill, would be the acquisition of “prevalence rates (how many unique people have been victimized during a given period of time), incidence rates (how many times assaults have occurred over a set period of time) and [a sense of] students’ perceptions of the campus climate around sexual assault.”
However, Circosta said that while it is “critical for NC State to understand our current climate related to sexual violence,” a two- to three-year cycle for conducting the survey would be most effective because it will still provide the university with appropriate insight while “recognizing the extreme sensitivity of the topic and avoiding potentially unnecessary re-victimization through the survey process” and “overtaxing students with surveys, which can lead to lower response rates.”