Date of Award

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Psychology (Ph.D.)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Imad Zaheer

Second Advisor

William Chaplin

Third Advisor

Jennifer Mascolo

Abstract

Much of the sexual assault prevention literature on the university level focuses on individual institutions’ varied efforts to address incidences of sexual assault on their campuses and their outcomes (Donais et al., 2018). While consent education programming has emerged as one such effort, there is a dearth of evaluative literature in this area and the understanding of the role of consent education alone in sexual violence prevention (Beres, 2020). Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate one university’s consent-centered educational program and explore its successes and limitations as the field moves towards standardizing sexual violence prevention efforts on college campuses. Results indicated that participants displayed significantly more knowledge of affirmative consent law after receiving the intervention than those same participants had demonstrated prior (pre-intervention responses: M = 88.1, SD = 9.37; post-intervention responses: M = 94.4, SD = 7.67). Consistent with this finding, when answering this question using all the available data, results indicated that participants displayed a significant increase in their knowledge of the laws of affirmative consent than they had shown on average before the training (t = 13.2, df = 1941, p < .001). The results also demonstrated that a significant number of participants achieved the intended learning outcomes after receiving the study intervention (χ² = 298, p <.001). Lastly, an analysis of the survey responses to consent-related attitude and opinion items found that for the participants with complete data, there was a small but significant increase in prosocial responses (pre-intervention responses: M = 3.79, SD = 0.72; post-intervention responses: M = 3.87, SD = 0.69). However, when all the available responses were analyzed, results showed that prosocial consent-related attitudes and opinions were already high at baseline and remained relatively the same after the intervention. The findings contribute to the limited literature on the effectiveness of consent educational programming through an analysis of the ‘Knowing Yes!’ Program and its effectiveness in increasing knowledge and influencing attitudes and opinions about affirmative consent in college students.

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