Last Wednesday, Oct. 21, a teach-in was held at El Centro Chicano y Latino to discuss the climate survey report on campus sexual violence released by Stanford earlier this month.

The session was facilitated by Michele Dauber, Stanford professor of law and sociology, Shelley Correll, professor of sociology, and Tessa Ormenyi ’14, Stanford alumna. Dauber and Correll analyzed the results of the survey. This information session was followed by a Q&A session led by Ormenyi.

Correll began the teach-in by asking the audience to think about why the University initiated the survey study.

“If the reason we undertook the survey is to figure out how to make Stanford a better place, then we needed to have kept that purpose in mind at every stage of the study,” Correll said. “That purpose should affect what definition of sexual assault we use, how we analyze our data and what of the many facts in the report we decide to emphasize in our communications to our community.”

The statistic that kept arising throughout the lecture was a reported 1.9 percent rate of sexual assault on campus. This number has been met with a lot of controversy, with many worrying that it underrepresents a large problem on campus that other statistics would better express.

“If our goal is to make Stanford a safer place, a place more conducive to learning, we need to be pouring through these data looking for problems and helping communicate those problems,” Correll said.

Additionally, some students raised concerns about the different survey methodology which made it difficult to compare results to other universities’. The Association of American Universities (AAU) created a survey for Campus Climate that 27 universities have participated in, and Stanford was not one of them.

University spokeswoman Lisa Lapin explained that when Stanford made its decision, the AAU survey mechanism was not yet available for review which prompted Stanford to choose another survey, which Lapin emphasized was equally valid, as well as peer-reviewed and tested in advance by Stanford students. Additionally, she said that Stanford initiated its own survey because the University wanted to add supplemental questions about campus climate beyond sexual assault experiences.

Potential for undercounting assault

Event organizers alleged that other issues may have led to the undercount of assault, specifically possibly confusing wording in survey questions about intoxication and incapacitation.

In the AAU survey, the question was phrased as follows: “Did this conduct occur as a result of your being unable to consent or stop what was happening because you were passed out, asleep, or incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol?”

Stanford had a series of yes or no questions to determine if a case should be classified as “sexual assault.” Respondents were asked “Did the person(s) do that by…” and then shown a series of eight statements that included information about whether or not the respondent was conscious and what, if any, coercive tactics were used by the other person.

Dauber expressed concern that there could be confusion in the instructions leading students to believe they needed to choose the one best answer, but Lapin said that for each question, a student responded by clicking “yes” or “no,” indicating that a response should be provided for each statement.

Lapin explained that this instrument was tested using cognitive interviews as a part of the design process, before being administered to the student body in the survey. None of the testers showed confusion with this question, and they understood that they were supposed to provide an answer for each line, Lapin reported.

“We used the best available instrument and method from academic research to guide us,” Lapin said via email to The Daily. “One of the reasons we did not ask respondents to itemize the exact number of incidents is out of a concern that it would increase the length and difficulty of the questionnaire for survivors.”

If a respondent reported sexual assault, other instances of sexual misconduct reported by that same student were not included in the initial press release, even if it was an unrelated incident that happened in a different year.

Dauber noted that being a survivor is a high-risk factor for being assaulted again, but Stanford’s report did not collect data for multiple assaults or misconducts for one individual. The survey design did not allow Stanford to determine whether multiple acts were part of the same incident or were different incidents.

“I’m not here to bash Stanford,” Correll said. “Some good things came out of the study. We did some things very well. For example, the response rate to our survey was the highest among our peers. We had some very talented people in charge of the design and implementation of the survey.”

Illustrating the numbers

During the talk, Correll showed a different way to illustrate the issue of sexual violence on Stanford’s campus.

“The survey found that 6.5 percent of senior undergraduate women have experienced sexual assault while at Stanford, even using Stanford’s very narrow definition of sexual assault,” Correll said.

Accounting for the current student population, she suggests that this means about 215 undergraduate women will experience sexual assault during their four years on campus. That translates into 1.8 sexual assaults per weekend, on average, for undergraduate women.

“This value feels a lot more personal, a lot bigger,” Correll said. “This is the type of number that will get people’s attention. If we want to solve the problem of sexual assault, we have to first get our community to believe there is a problem.”

Future steps

In conclusion, Correll emphasized that this problem is not Stanford-specific, but she encouraged the University to conduct more analysis and publish another press release highlighting problems that we, as a community, need to address.

“There is a lot more we can learn from the data we collected,” Correll said.

Lapin explained that she believes that the University has been transparent and thorough in all of its reporting of the climate survey results.

“[This transparency] is very clear when you read the letter to the campus community from the President and Provost, the press release, and see all of the statistics posted to the website with the complete climate survey report,” Lapin wrote. “It is unfortunate that some activists are focusing their energy on highlighting one number, rather than on the totality of the issue. All of the findings, for every subset of students, are of great concern to the University.”

In light of Stanford’s report, Ormenyi emphasized student-led involvement and collaboration at Stanford.

“A lot of people are talking about sexual assault and sexual misconduct and what should be done,” Ormenyi said. “But we need to be talking to each other in the same room.”

Ormenyi expressed hope that Stanford would release the complete collection of data, including all data tables.

“There’s a huge space for a response when students become involved,” she said. “I personally think that more teach-ins like this are a great idea.”

 

Contact Sophie Stuber at sstuber8 ‘at’ stanford.edu.