Grant Recipient: University of Arizona
Principal Investigators: Elise Lopez, DrPH, University of Arizona
Mary Koss, Ph.D., University of Arizona
Mike Baiocchi, Ph.D., Stanford University
Kevin Swartout, Ph.D., Georgia State University
Term: 2019 –2022
Funding: $2,000,000
Summary: The Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act (EAAA) program is a sexual assault resistance program for first-year female university students that has been rigorously evaluated and shown to produce large reductions in sexual assault on college campuses. A well-conducted, multi-site RCT at three Canadian universities, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, found that EAAA reduced the incidence of completed rape by half: during their first year of college, 10% of women in the control group were raped vs. 5% of women in the EAAA group. The program also reduced the incidence of attempted, but not completed, rape (experienced by 9% of the control group vs. 3% of the treatment group). Both differences were statistically significant.
Under this project, five U.S. universities will expand delivery of EAAA to 1,000 female students over four years – 200 students each at The University of Arizona, Stanford University, Georgia State University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, and Cornell University.
Additionally, all five universities will participate in a multi-site RCT to determine whether the impacts found in the Canadian study can be reproduced in the U.S. context. Researchers will enroll a sample of 2,000 female university students and randomly assign half to receive the EAAA intervention and half to participate in their university’s standard sexual assault prevention programming. The study’s primary outcome will be incidence of completed rape in the 12 months after random assignment.
The study’s pre-specified pre-analysis plan is linked here.
