Type of Judge Influences Judgments of College Women's Responses to Increasingly Coercive Sexual and Nonsexual Social Situations.

Abstract

Research examining women's ability to respond to sexually risky situations has relied on trait-based measures or experts' judgments to determine the effectiveness of women's responses. To date, no work has examined whether there are differences among relevant judges with respect to these evaluations. As part of a larger study, 100 undergraduate women listened to descriptions of sexual and nonsexual social situations, viewed clips of a male actor making increasingly coercive verbal requests to each situation, provided a videotaped response to each request, and evaluated the effectiveness of their own responses in decreasing risk for sexual victimization. Women's responses were provided to experts in sexual violence research (n = 8) and undergraduate men (n = 107) who also rated their effectiveness. All raters were asked to attend to both verbal and nonverbal behaviors when providing their ratings. As verbal coercion increased across both types of situations, responses were rated by undergraduate women and undergraduate men as more effective, suggesting that responses become more effective as risk increases for a negative outcome. Experts rated women's responses to moderate coercion as being more effective than responses to low coercion but rated responses to high coercion as less effective than responses to moderate coercion. Additionally, experts and undergraduate women rated women's responses to the sexual victimization risk vignettes as more effective than responses to the nonsexual social situation vignettes. In most cases, experts and undergraduate women's ratings were not statistically different from one another; however, undergraduate men rated undergraduate women's responses to both the sexual victimization risk and the nonsexual social situation vignettes as less effective than experts or undergraduate women. This article discusses applications of these findings for future prevention efforts focused on maximizing the effectiveness of women's responses in sexually risky situations.