Broadening campus threat assessment beyond mass shootings

Abstract

a b s t r a c tRecord reviews of public figure, primary/secondary school, and workplace threateners and attackers displayed the importance of noticing pre-incident behaviors and intervening to prevent violence. General crime prevention strategies did not appear applicable. Similarly, campus threat assessment research has considered targeted violence as distinctive and unable to be reviewed within general collegiate samples, which has related to questions about the prevalence, predictiveness, applicability, and reporting of pre-incident behaviors. This article applies general criminological and crime prevention findings to these questions and presents campus threat assessment methodologies informed by these fields. With college student surveys, pre-incident behaviors have appeared predictive of general physical assault, which promotes investigation of the generalizability of campus threat assessment across collegiate bullying, intimate partner, stalking, and workplace violence concerns. In college student surveys, the majority of observed pre-incident behavior has not been reported to campus authorities and has been impacted by students' personal victimization, assessment of dangerousness, and relationship with the perpetrator. Efforts to enhance reporting in general criminological and crime prevention fields could be applied to improving pre-incident authority notification. Thus, viewing campus threat assessment within the broader violence prevention framework can advance the efficiency, effectiveness, and applicability of the approach.

College Student Reporting Responses to Hypothetical and Actual Safety Concerns

“…Regarding campus generalizability, the sample may not fully represent the collegiate community, as participants were from a psychology department student pool, and no faculty/staff was surveyed. Thus, with repetitive requests for additional research (Hoff, 2015;Hollister, 2015;Hollister & Scalora, 2015;Pollack et al, 2009;Scalora et al, 2010;Sulkowski, 2011), campus reporting improvement could be explored further, with diverse samples, various scales of reporting factors, and multimodal examinations, to address weaknesses in the current study and general field.…”

“…Eight incident-related variables that have impacted reporting decisions (Hollister & Scalora, 2015) were coded based on participant answers to questions in Appendix A. The total concerning behaviors displayed by the perpetrator (TCB) variable was calculated by adding the amount of threatening behavior categories selected (i.e., on Appendix A, Question 1).…”

“…In studies with larger collegiate samples, several incident and attitudinal factors have related to students' unwillingness to report (Hollister & Scalora, 2015). But, without comprehensive multivariate considerations, these examinations have provided several disparate reporting improvement suggestions.…”

“…Some campus sexual assault prevention efforts have produced lasting attitudinal changes (Brecklin & Forde, 2001;Breitenbecher, 2000;Paul & Gray, 2011), but have generally lacked review of willingness to report (Breitenbecher, 2000;Hollister & Scalora, 2015;Paul & Gray, 2011). Sexual assault prevention efforts have been most successful with relevant and nonconfrontational material tailored toward college students likely to witness and not report concerning activity (e.g., males and minority groups with poor perceptions of police; Brank et al, 2007;Slocum, Taylor, Brick, & Esbensen, 2010), and these effective techniques have frequently been applied to recommendations for addressing general student attitudes related to unwillingness to report (Hollister et al, 2014;Sulkowski, 2011).…”

“…Even with these recommendations and recent increases in administrative scrutiny and financial expenditures on campus violence prevention (i.e., after mass shootings at Northern Illinois and Virginia Tech universities; Drysdale, Modzeleski, & Simons, 2010;Lazarus & Sulkowski, 2011), seemingly no empirical program evaluation of attempted collegiate reporting improvement efforts has occurred (Hollister & Scalora, 2015).…”