Measurement tools to assess relationship abuse and sexual assault prevention program effectiveness among youth.

Abstract

Objective: This article describes the adaptation, development, and psychometric properties of survey instruments to assess outcomes of bystander-focused violence prevention efforts among high school students, including media literacy, rape myths, bystander readiness, bystander barriers and facilitators of bystander action, bystander intentions, perceptions of school personnel helping, perceptions of peer helping, and victim empathy. Method: The study was based on data collected from 3,172 high school students across 25 schools in northern New England. Results: Overall, the measures demonstrated acceptable fit indices in multilevel exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Whereas most measures and subscales had adequate reliability, several measures had less than ideal internal consistency, likely because of the limited number of items. Conclusion: Although additional measurement work is needed, these measures provide researchers and practitioners with foundational tools for basic research and program evaluation.

Exposure to a youth-led sexual violence prevention program among adolescents: The impact of engagement.

“…We used the work of Banyard and colleagues (Banyard et al, 2014) as a base as well as adaptations of this work for high school samples by Coker and colleagues (Coker et al, 2019), and validity was confirmed in other analyses using this data set (Banyard et al, 2021). We chose the specific bystander situations included by drawing upon recent work on high school students as bystanders to dating violence, sexual harassment and violence, and stalking (Edwards et al, 2017). Four questions asked students about behaviors in which sexual harassment or sexual violence was about to happen or had already happened (referred to as reactive bystander behavior or reactive actionism).…”

“What would the neighbors do?” Measuring sexual and domestic violence prevention social norms among youth and adults

“…The full study sample (including youth and adult surveys) was randomly split in half to allow for the computation of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses (EFA and CFA) as done in previous research (Edwards, Banyard, et al, ). One half of the data was used to run exploratory factor analyses while the other half of the data was used to compute confirmatory factor analyses for the final sets of items for each scale using MPlus 8.0 statistical software.…”

Evaluation of a Bystander-Focused Interpersonal Violence Prevention Program with High School Students

“…Theoretical models (Ajzen, 1991;Prochaska & DiClemente, 1984;Prochaska et al, 1992;Rogers, 2002;Rosenstock, 1974), in conjunction with previous etiological research, indicate key intermediary outcomes for bystander-focused prevention of interpersonal violence. These intermediary outcomes include knowledge, victim empathy (Ahrens & Campbell, 2000), rape myth acceptance, or the degree to which one accepts false beliefs about sexual assault perpetrators, and victims (McMahon & Farmer, 2011), and media literacy, or the degree to which youth notice harmful portrayals of relationships in the media (Edwards et al, 2018;Manganello, 2008). In addition, these intermediary outcomes include bystander barriers (Edwards et al, 2018) and bystander readiness, an awareness of the problem and the lack of denial about the problem.…”

“…These intermediary outcomes include knowledge, victim empathy (Ahrens & Campbell, 2000), rape myth acceptance, or the degree to which one accepts false beliefs about sexual assault perpetrators, and victims (McMahon & Farmer, 2011), and media literacy, or the degree to which youth notice harmful portrayals of relationships in the media (Edwards et al, 2018;Manganello, 2008). In addition, these intermediary outcomes include bystander barriers (Edwards et al, 2018) and bystander readiness, an awareness of the problem and the lack of denial about the problem. Bystander readiness is a key part of Latené and Darley's model of what helps bystanders take action (Banyard, 2008;.…”

“…Relationship media literacy.-We used the Bothered by the Media subscale of the Relationship Media Literacy Scale (Edwards et al, 2018;Edwards, Rodenhizer-Stämpfli, & Eckstein, 2014) at all time points (e.g. "I am bothered by the media's portrayal of relationship abuse and sexual assault" and "I'm bothered by the media's portrayal of girls and guys").…”