Unreadable and Underreported: Can College Students Comprehend How to Report Sexual Assault?

Title IX's Clery Act (1986) requires postsecondary institutions receiving Title IV funds to "disclose accurate and complete crime statistics for incidents that are reported to Campus Security Authorities (CSAs) and local law enforcement as having occurred on or near the campus" (White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, 2014, para.4). Included in this mandated crime reporting is the incidence of sexual assault on or near campus; however, institutions adhering to the Clery Act can only report crimes that are reported to them: as recently as 2006, nearly 80% of all 2-year and 4-year institutions in the United States did not report a single sexual offense (Lombardi & Jones, 2015). This apparent absence of sexual assault on campus simply does not represent the lived experiences of college students.

Longitudinal research has suggested that sexual assault on college campuses is widespread and grossly underreported (Lombardi & Jones, 2015). In their seminal study of sexual assault on 32 college campuses, Koss, Gidycz, and Wisniewski (1985) found that 54% of undergraduate women and 26% of undergraduate men experienced sexual aggression or victimization during college. Over 30 years later, Krebs, Lindquist, Berzovsky, Shook-Sa, and Peterson (2016) found that 21% of all female students experienced sexual assault during their undergraduate careers and 13% were raped by the time they graduated. More troubling, recent research demonstrates more than 90% of all sexual assault victims on a college campus—students who identify with any gender identity and/or sexual orientation—do not report the crime (National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2015). In no uncertain terms, sexual assault and the underreporting of sexual assault on campus are troubling problems for students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and others working with college students.

To curb the problem of underreporting, numerous lawmaking bodies have attempted to remove barriers to reporting sexual assault on college campuses. In 2013, President Obama signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, which expanded the definitions of domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking and included them in Clery Act reporting requirements. In 2016, the state of Wisconsin passed legislation—Assembly Bill 808—prohibiting victims of sexual assault from being fined for underage drinking, in hopes that college students would be more willing to come forward and report a crime on campus. Educational researchers have advocated for improving physical and mental health services to boost disclosure of sexual assault (Sabina & Ho, 2014), intersectionality counseling to promote sexual assault prevention and reporting (Coulter et al., 2017), and institutional use of longitudinal prevention and research models to inform new sexual assault reporting policies and procedures (Banyard, 2014).

To date, scholars have not examined a seemingly commonsense aspect of sexual assault reporting: the readability of the reporting instructions themselves; therefore, in this study I examined the readability—using four commonly used measures—of sexual assault reporting instructions of 100 four-year institutions in the United States to answer this research question: Can college students of average reading comprehension ability read and comprehend sexual assault reporting instructions?

METHOD

In this project I employed a rarely used method in higher education research: an analysis of textual readability. The sample, data, and procedures for this study are detailed below.

Sample

The population of interest for this study is all 4-year public and private nonprofit colleges and universities, representing a sampling frame of 2,386 institutions in the United States. This population was identified as being relevant to the study of sexual assault reporting instructions, as these institutions often have large percentages of students living on or near campus and these institutions deliver predominantly face-to-face education instead of online education.

A sample size of 100 institutions was established, given the time necessary to locate each institution's sexual assault reporting instructions, extract the text therein, and calculate four readability measures per set of instructions. To reduce bias and increase generalizability, I used a simple random sampling technique. Once I identified all 2,386 institutions using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, I sorted each institution alphabetically by name and assigned each institution a number. I then used a...