Beyond the Party Lifestyle: A Quantitative Analysis of Sexual Victimization Among College Students
Year: 2016
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The last two years have been a time of marked interest in understanding and stopping victimization, specifically, the sexual victimization of college students.With increasing interest and focus on sexual victimization it is important to understand why it happens to keep it from occurring as well as help develop policies and procedures that target particular behaviors and populations, which might be at an increased risk of such victimization.Despite the current increased interest among the public and government concerning sexual victimization on college campuses this is not a new topic, it is one that has received attention from the public, media, the government, and academia for almost three decades.Studies on the sexual victimization of college students over the last 20 to 30 years revealed that students who lead particular "party" lifestyles are at an increased risk of victimization.Recently, research has begun to move beyond the party lifestyles and examine other factors -such as personal characteristics, defined as target congruence measures-that may be contributing to risk of victimization in order to develop a fuller picture of risk factors to help prevent future victimization from occurring.This study extends past research by bridging the gap between these two theories-of lifestyle-routine activities and target congruence-by examining the relationship between all three concepts of target congruence while controlling for all four concepts of lifestyles-routine activities theory among a national-level sample of college students.Furthermore, this study examines female and male subsamples in order to better understand how sex may be acting as a moderating variable, which may impact future prevention and intervention measures.Bivariate and multivariate results indicate that there is strong evidence that certain measures of target congruence should be added to future research.Every model showed significant improvement with the addition of target congruence measures above and beyond just lifestyle-routine activities measures.In iii addition, there is evidence that sex acts not only as a main effect, but also as a moderator.Implications for future research, prevention, intervention, and policy measures are presented.
Author: Kathryn Elvey
Institution: University of Cincinnati
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2600102780