The Importance of Recurring Campus Surveys of Interpersonal Violence: An Analysis of Period and Cohort Effects

Abstract

ABSTRACT Assessing change in campus interpersonal violence over time is an important step to understand the nature and prevalence of students’ victimization experiences. Using a repeated cross-sectional campus survey of interpersonal violence from a large southern university, this article tracks the change of students’ victimization experiences over a three-year period for two identified undergraduate student cohorts and offers empirical evidence to determine the best time in a college student’s career to initially launch a campus interpersonal violence survey and how often such data should be collected. Controlling for demographic characteristics, the results indicate that both administration-year-effect and cohort-effect exist. The results further suggest that yearly campus interpersonal violence surveys would be most beneficial to track campus interpersonal violence change.