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

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.