While there is substantial scholarship on the contextual factors of college campuses that contribute to rates of college sexual assault, limited literature has been dedicated to the campus attributes associated with the rate of reporting those assaults to Title IX. College sexual assault victimization surveys offer an opportunity for quantitative analysis of the under-reporting of sexual assaults to Title IX offices. Two college victimization surveys with publicly available results are the 2019 American Association of Universities (AAU) Campus Climate Survey and the universities that post their data from the commercially available HEDS (Higher Education Data Sharing) Consortium Sexual Assault Campus Climate Survey. Using common variables across these two data sets and outside sources, this mixed-methods study quantitatively determines the campus characteristics that most strongly determine the rates of reporting sexual assaults to Title IX and performs a qualitative document analysis to determine thematic differences in the questionnaires used to gather the data for this study.
The results indicate considerable quantitative differences in the characteristics of HEDS and AAU universities that are predictive of their reporting rates. Specifically, the rates of reporting at AAU universities are better predicted by variables derived from literature on the contributing factors to sexual assault rates (alcohol consumption, Greek life participation and the presence of athletics) and that reporting rates at HEDS universities, while difficult to predict overall, are better captured by variables about campus climate. Qualitatively, the document analysis reveals thematic differences between the two survey questionnaires, specifically that the AAU questionnaire does more to support survivors and uses more sensitive language. In contrast, the HEDS questionnaire more frequently reiterates the purpose of the research inquiry and uses more insensitive language. This study concludes that to determine the difference between the schools included in the AAU and HEDS studies, comparable survey instruments should be used across schools with widely different characteristics, namely enrollment size. Future research should more closely examine the relationship between trauma-informed language in online questionnaires and the accuracy of reporting rates in the data collected to develop best practices for using trauma-informed language in online sexual assault data collection.