Translating and Piloting a Bystander Social Marketing Campaign for Diverse Campus Populations

Background: For almost twenty-five years researchers have documented the magnitude of the problem of sexual and relationship violence in college and university campus communities. As an age cohort, women ages 16-24 experience the highest rates of intimate partner violence and 20% of college female students will experience an incidence of relationship violence. Further three to 4% of American men report an attempted or completed rape during adulthood and 7% of college men report an attempted or completed assault while in college.  In campus communities the majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated by acquaintances (e.g., classmates, residence hall neighbors, dates) or intimate partners of the victim.  With few exceptions the majority of sexual and relationship violence prevention strategies currently administered on college and university campuses focus on the experience of  heterosexual white females and do not consider the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of college and university student populations.

Program background: The Know Your Power Bystander Social Marketing Campaign has received funding from a variety of agencies including Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Justice, Department of Defense, University of California, Merced and the UNH Parent Association. The campaign was developed at the University of New Hampshire and has currently been adopted by 50 colleges and universities around the United States. The campaign currently has 22 images that have been used on 11x17 posters, table tents, bookmarks, postcards, bus wraps computer pop-up screens, and a website. The campaign logo is used on a number of collateral products

Evaluation Methods and Results: In this presentation we will describe two efforts in which a bystander social marketing campaign developed on a midsize northeastern public university with a student body where 95% of the students identify as white was translated. First we will describe the translation of the campaign for a small California public university where 37% of the student population identifies as Hispanic and 29% of the student population identify as Asian/Pacific Islander. Second we describe the translation of the campaign to engage students in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender college community. For both translation efforts we will report the results of two different pilot studies that utilize a pretest and posttest methodology to show how exposure to the bystander social marketing campaign reduced participants’ beliefs in rape myths in both underserved populations and engaged members of these under represented campus communities to take action when sexual and relationship violence have the potential to occur, are occurring or have occurred.   

Conclusions: We find that carefully constructed campaign images and a multi-method dissemination strategy engaged members of the target audience.

Implications for research and/or practice: From 1993-2003 minority enrollments in colleges and universities increased by 51% and continued increases are expected. Nascent research on the effectiveness of sexual and violence prevention strategies indicates that one prevention strategy does not fit all. In other words, for a prevention strategy to resonate with members of the target audience it needs to be realistic and believable in their world.