Transnational Talks: Enhancing the quality of campus climate survey data

Enhancing the Quality of Campus Climate Survey Data: The Contribution of a Supplementary Open-Ended Question

Recently, only a few fields have moved as far and fast as research on various types of crime on North American institutions of higher education. Despite major empirical advances that have been made since the mid 1980s, obtaining accurate estimates of the prevalence of violence against women and other harms on the college campus is still one of the biggest methodological challenges in survey research. The problem of underreporting is difficult to overcome and is not likely to be eliminated in the near future. For example, many people do not disclose their victimization experiences because of fear of reprisal, reluctance to recall traumatic memories, memory error, and other factors.

Further, there may have experienced things that are not included in closed-ended questions. And, they may want to provide information on important issues that a campus survey was not specifically designed to uncover. There are several effective ways of dealing with these challenges, one of which is adding a supplementary open-ended question to a questionnaire.

Using qualitative data derived from the Campus Quality of Life Survey (CQLS) administered at a large college in a South Atlantic Region of the United States, the main objective of this presentation is to show that asking respondents to complete such a question situated at the end of an instrument crafted to measure stalking, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and hate crime revealed evidence of a culture of angry white men who perceive themselves as what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild refers to as “strangers in their own land.”

About the speaker

Walter S. DeKeseredy is Anna Deane Carlson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences, Director of the Research Center on Violence, and Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. He has published 25 books, 100 scientific journal articles and 83 scholarly book chapters on violence against women and other social problems. In 2008, the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma gave him the Linda Saltzman Memorial Intimate Partner Violence Researcher Award. He also jointly received the 2004 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology's (ASC) Division on Women and Crime and the 2007 inaugural UOIT Research Excellence Award. In 1995, he received the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award from the ASC’s Division on Critical Criminology (DCC) and in 2008 the DCC gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, he received the Critical Criminal Justice Scholar Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences' (ACJS) Section on Critical Criminal Justice and in 2015, he received the Career Achievement Award from the ASC's Division on Victimology. In 2017, he received the Impact Award from the ACJS’s section on Victimology and the Robert Jerrin Book Award from the ASC’s Division on Victimology.

Also: Join an afternoon methods workshop with Professor DeKeseredy, Using Crime Surveys as Tools of Critical Insight, focused on innovative ways of enhancing the quality of crime victimization survey data. March 13, 2:30-4:30 pm in PAS 2030.

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Questions? Contact Professor Janice Aurini or Professor Kate Henne.

This event is part of the 2018-2019 Transnational Talks series, a Department of Sociology and Legal Studies initiative supported by Waterloo International, which aims to foster international collaboration and enhance methods training and exposure among faculty and students.