The Development of a Comprehensive Measure of the Sexual Victimization of College Women

Abstract

It is only in recent years that sexual victimization has been identified as a salient problem on college and university campuses. Researchers have used a variety of different methodologies and data sources to describe the extent and the nature of sexual victimization of college women. These studies, however, are most commonly flawed by an incomplete conceptualization of sexual victimization (e.g., omitting sexual harassment and stalking), and by the inability to distinguish between different ranges of more and less serious sexual victimizations. This article presents a comprehensive measure of sexual victimization that includes incident reports to gather detailed accounts of sexual victimizations.