With Kamaria Porter and many graduate and undergraduate students, we coded the 2016 sexual misconduct policies, websites, and Annual Security Reports of 381 U.S. universities. This enabled us to document university definitions of prohibited conduct, definitions of sexual consent, prevention programming, reporting policies, resources, and adjudicatory approaches. All policy documents and websites coded are archived and can be coded for other purposes. The 2016 data is of particular interest as it describes the state of the field at the end of the Obama administration, which was a high-water mark for victim-centered approaches to sexual assault on university campuses.
The sample is nationally representative. It was drawn from the population of degree-granting, public or private, nonprofit, 4-year and above colleges and universities with undergraduate enrollments of 900 or more. From this list we selected two overlapping samples: a random sample of 298 schools and a certainty sample of 114 schools. The certainty sample included the primary public state flagship of each state, members of athletic conferences (Big 10, Big 12, NESCAC, and the Peach Belt), Ivy League schools, and the 10 most selective Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), women’s colleges, and Christian colleges.
The analysis of this data has produced a number of papers, listed below.
