Germinal studies have described the prevalence of sex-based harassment in high schools and its associations with adverse outcomes in adolescents. Studies have focused on students, with little attention given to the actions of high schools themselves. Though journalists responded to the #MeToo movement by reporting on schools’ betrayal of students who report misconduct, this topic remains understudied by researchers. Gender harassment is characterized by sexist remarks, sexually crude or offensive behavior, gender policing, work-family policing, and infantilization. Institutional betrayal is characterized by the failure of an institution, such as a school, to protect individuals dependent on the institution. We investigated high school gender harassment and institutional betrayal reported retrospectively by 535 current undergraduates. Our primary aim was to investigate whether institutional betrayal moderates the relationship between high school gender harassment and current trauma symptoms. In our pre-registered hypotheses (https://osf.io/3ds8k), we predicted that (1) high school gender harassment would be associated with more current trauma symptoms and (2) institutional betrayal would moderate this relationship such that high levels of institutional betrayal would be associated with a stronger association between high school gender harassment and current trauma symptoms. Consistent with our first hypothesis, high school gender harassment significantly predicted college trauma-related symptoms. An equation that included participant gender, race, age, high school gender harassment, institutional betrayal, and the interaction of gender harassment and institutional betrayal also significantly predicted trauma-related symptoms. Contrary to our second hypothesis, the interaction term was non-significant. However, institutional betrayal predicted unique variance in current trauma symptoms above and beyond the other variables. These findings indicate that both high school gender harassment and high school institutional betrayal are independently associated with trauma symptoms, suggesting that intervention should target both phenomena.
Objective: Modifiable risk factors for chronic diseases are plausible targets for intervention. However, psychosocial risk factors, including markers of perceived and biological stress, are understudied. Mobile sensing data, which are continuously collected from a person’s naturalistic smartphone use, may be used to examine the effect of both acute and prolonged stressors. We conducted a pilot study to test a mobile sensing collection tool, and to validate naturalistic text collection from smartphones as an objective behavioral indicator of stress.Methods: We assessed 25 undergraduate students in 2016 - 2017 (mean age = 20.64 years, S.D. = 2.74, 13 males, 12 females, 13 men, 12 women). We collected affective text language use via a custom keyboard, self-reported questionnaires of depressive and anxious symptoms, perceived and subjective stress, sleep, and lifetime cumulative stress, and the biological stress markers salivary C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-1β.Results: Due to the pilot and exploratory nature of the study, only effect sizes are reported. We observed large effect-size associations between three measures of affective language (total positive words, total negative words, and total affective words) and cumulative lifetime history of stressful events. We also observed a large inverse correlation between negative words and reported hours slept. There were medium effect-size associations between affective language measures and self-reported subjective and perceived acute stress, as well as CRP.Conclusions: The current study shows initial promise and justification for using mobile sensing measures, especially text, in future studies.
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