| Description |
Sexual violence is a significant problem in the United States. Recent social and political events, such as the #MeToo movement, have brought discussions about sexual violence, victim-blaming, and predatory behavior to the fore of public dialogue in important ways. Understanding, and thus eliminating, sexual violence is a concern of most social science disciplines, with much research set within the conceptual frameworks of rape myth acceptance and rape-supportive attitudes. This important work has informed study of sexual violence to a great degree, but there has been a call in the literature to consider rape-resistant attitudes to gain a more nuanced understanding of sexual violence. Psychometric tools are commonly used to assess unobservable attitudes, and the psychometric properties of these tools are important indicators of reliability and validity. This mixed-methods project takes seriously the call to identify rape-resistant attitudes and develop instruments to test them. A search of relevant literature and interviews with experts in the field informed the conceptualization of an attitudinal dimension that may be considered rape-resistant. These attitudes indicate not only low rape proclivity but also reluctance to participate in victimblaming. A psychometric instrument containing statements intended to measure raperesistant attitudes was developed and tested in both a pilot study and full sample of college students from the University of Utah. Statistical analyses through principal component factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and multivariate regression confirmed that the instrument measuring rape-resistant attitudes was indeed both reliable and valid with data from this sample, and is ready to be tested in other populations. In addition to the statistically and conceptually refined 25-item instrument, the Abbreviated Rape-Resistant Attitudes (ARRA) scale, analysis shows that a set of 10 attitudinal dimensions informs a broader index of rape-resistant attitudes. Sixty items tested in this sample are appropriate for domain sampling to answer specific research questions related to rape resistance and sexual violence. The process of developing the ARRA is detailed here. Psychometric properties are discussed, and rape resistance as a conceptual framework is considered. Usage notes for the ARRA and/or domain sampling from the index of tested items are offered. |
