- This event has passed.
Student-athlete Preferences for Sexual Violence Reporting: A Discrete Choice Experiment
November 7, 2022 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm EST
Featuring: Alice Ellyson, Acting Assistant Professor | Department of Pediatrics | School of Medicine, University of Washington
Background: Sexual violence (SV) is prevalent among US college athletes, but formal reports are rare. Little is known about adaptations to institution-level reporting policies and procedures that could facilitate reporting.
Methods: We conducted a discrete choice experiment (DCE) survey with 1,004 student-athletes at ten Division I NCAA member institutions to examine how attributes of the reporting system influence the decision to formally report SV to their institution. Changes in utility values were estimated using multinomial logistic regression and mixed multinomial logistic regression and can be compared to understand preferences.
Results: Student-athletes preferred the availability of substance use amnesty policies (estimated utility mean=1.29, SD=-1.28) as well as higher probabilities of students perpetrating SV being found in violation of code of conduct policies (estimated utility of 50% mean=1.44, SD=-0.93; estimated utility of 70% mean=1.74, SD=-1.16) with consistently estimated with positive values across student-athletes. While anonymous reporting and survivor-initiated investigations were preferred by student-athletes on average, sizeable deviations from mean estimated utilities suggest considerable valuation heterogeneity between student-athletes. Student-athletes with prior SV experiences were more likely to opt-out of formally reporting in the DCE paired choice, had lower estimated utility values for all attributes, and had less between-person heterogeneity. Findings were robust to a variety of sensitivity analyses.
Conclusions: Changes to reporting policies and procedures (e.g., implementing substance use amnesty policies) may be a promising institution-level intervention to increase formal reporting of SV among student-athletes. More research is needed to understand preference heterogeneity between students and generalize these findings to broader student populations.