Forty percent of the student body -— including undergraduate students, graduate students and those in professional schools -— submitted responses to the Association of American Universities sexual assault campus climate survey sent out to campus last month, Title IX coordinator and Clery Act compliance officer Heather Lindkvist said. Dartmouth was one of 28 universities to participate in the survey, though not all other schools have completed the survey.
Lindkvist said that though she would always hope for a higher response rate, she was excited by the yield and that it would be possible to draw meaningful conclusions from the results. A final response rate will be made available after May 10 following a more complete review of the responses, Lindkvist said, which would prevent survey responses with minor errors, such as a participant missing one question, from being included in the final tally.
“I feel confident that we’ll be able to learn something from this survey and implement changes based on the survey,” Lindkvist said.
The survey will be helpful in evaluating resources on campus and in identifying the prevalence of sexual assault at the College, she said, and will inform future steps taken to improve services. Lindkvist noted that resources are will not only be provided to students, but will be made available to faculty and staff as well.
“I think this will be incredibly helpful for someone like me who’s looking institutionally about concerns of sexual assault and misconduct to find out what’s really happening in the community,” Lindkvist said.
The content of the responses will not be available until the fall, when the data will be made accessible to the public on the Office of Institutional Research’s website, she added.
“We’re in basically a holding pattern until there,” Lindkvist said.
AAU’s vice president for public affairs Barry Toiv said he could not compare Dartmouth’s response rate to that of other schools’ because it is the responsibility of individual schools to release results.
Toiv said all participating schools will have completed the survey by the end of May. Aggregate data from every university participating will be released in the fall, Toiv said, though it will be impossible to differentiate between universities unless they choose to release their data independently.
Toiv noted that this data will not include Dartmouth because the College is not an member of the AAU.
The data aggregation will serve to gauge the broader climate of sexual assault at research universities, though Toiv added that many types of colleges do not belong to AAU, including small private colleges, community colleges and smaller universities.
“I wouldn’t want to imply that [the results are] national,” Toiv said. “It’s only for the research institutions that belong to AAU.”
The goal of the survey, Toiv said, is to gather data for individual schools’ use and to inform policymakers and researchers.
Dartmouth’s implementation of the survey has provided lessons for the survey’s implementation at other schools, Lindkvist said. Most notably, in the informed consent section, a “trigger warning” section was not as bold or prominent as some respondents would have liked, Lindkvist said.
In response to this feedback from Dartmouth students, Lindkvist said other schools have worked to make the warning more prominent in the beginning of the surveys and in other sections where it is especially applicable.
John Damianos ’16, a member of the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault, learned about the survey yield results at the “Moving Dartmouth Forward” town hall meeting hosted by Palaeopitus senior society Tuesday night.
“I’m very optimistic about the survey,” Damianos said. “I think it’s a huge step in doing research on college campuses. It’s important to do these surveys. It’s important to collect these numbers, as laborious as these surveys may be.”
This survey will be more helpful in evaluating campus climate than simply counting the number of assaults reported, Damianos said, because survey participants are not required to file formal reports.
Damianos said he had heard mixed reviews about the survey from other students — some said its comprehensiveness was a positive point, while others said that the chain of questions prompted by responding “yes” to certain questions made for an overly long and involved process that deterred respondents from completing the survey.
A Dartmouth-specific social climate survey is coming in the future, Damianos said, which he believes will be more accurate in evaluating the campus climate and will mitigate potential concerns about the AAU’s data being skewed or otherwise inaccurate.
A female member of the class of 2017 who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the topic, said the survey was made in a way that was psychologically harmful to those who had experienced assault, especially those who had experienced multiple assaults.
“Once you say yes to an incident, you’re just piled on with follow-up questions to relate the incident to other incidents,” she said.
The survey was important, she said, in evaluating how many assaults are happening, and it could be improved by removing the follow-up questions and asking respondents to simply report their experiences in a straightforward manner.
This is not a one-time survey, Lindkvist said, but rather a part of an ongoing process aimed at listening to students’ concerns and improving services for students. The survey will be sent out again in the future, she said.
“I think that’s really important for the community to know, you can’t only assess a place in time, and in order to track improvement you have to implement the survey again and hopefully again after that,” Lindkvist said. “This is only the beginning of a long process of conducting assessments of our programs.”