RAPID: Assessing the impact of Harassment and other Negative Events on Inclusion of Undergraduate Students in STEM

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

There is need to understand the prevalence, impact, and source of sexual and gender harassment on the careers of women in STEM. Such events which can have an additive, cumulative effect on careers. How does this cumulative adversity affect women and when does it cause them to leave STEM altogether? While this topic has been studied in great detail, there is a lack of understanding of the relationship between harassment, short-term behavior, and long-term outcomes, as well as the structural issues that impact the university response. The proposed study will address this by following students through their entire four-year undergraduate university experience, and combining detailed measures of short-term behavior, mental health, and physical activity with qualitative data. The analysis will be of use to policy makers, will help clinicians develop new therapeutic approaches, and will ultimately support intervention design. In 2018, a team at the University of Washington launched UWEXP, which aims to study undergraduate engineering students during their entire four-year college experience, and which is unique in that it uses passive sensing (from phones and Fitbits), combined with self-reported answers to bi-weekly questionnaires and periodic longer surveys, to better understand the student experience. Analysis of the 2018 pilot data has unfortunately uncovered an unexpectedly high level of violence, sexual assault, ridicule and gender harassment. The data contains uniquely-detailed passively-sensed information around such negative experiences. To best understand the impact of these events, it is critical to collect more information from study participants as soon as possible, especially while the students are still enrolled at the university. Important information can be obtained from follow up interviews and new analysis, and it would be especially illustrative to collect and study four consecutive years of data. For these reasons, RAPID funds are requested to continue the UWEXP project during the 2019-2020 academic year, while the team continues longer-term fund-raising for the planned four-year data collection. The team will interview participants who experienced harassment about the timeline of their experience; collect another year of data from the participants in the 2018 and 2019 cohorts to make longitudinal analyses of impact possible; study the impact of harassment on participants' behavior immediately following the event and over time, as well as the impact of protective factors such as social support and resilience; and develop algorithms that can detect changes in behavior induced by harassment. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.