title: Sexual violence prevention campaigns
title: exploring existing messages, processes, and future needs
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Abbott, Anne L.
Publisher: name: University of Iowa
Year: 2025
Subjects: Campaigns
Health Communication
Sexual violence
Social Media
Violence Prevention
public abstract
Health Promotion

description: Sexual assault is a pervasive threat to public health, particularly among youth and young adult populations. Effective interventions and strategies including health communication campaigns and other messaging are thus needed to reduce prevalence. Accordingly, this dissertation involved three studies aimed at better understanding the health communication messaging landscape around sexual assault prevention. Study 1 was a descriptive content analysis of National Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) tweets and participating Twitter accounts. A simple random sample of tweets (n=1523) was manually coded to better understand the public health and communication functions of these tweets. While approximately 70% of tweets included primary, secondary, or tertiary prevention strategies, the inclusion of primary prevention content was less common. Many tweets did not address upper levels of the social ecology an instead focused on individual- or interpersonal-level health behaviors or more nebulous support for the campaign. Most of the 867 unique accounts tweeting during SAAM represented organizations rather than individuals: with most of these representing “public service organizations” (many with clear ties to violence-issues) or colleges/ universities rather than K-12 schools, healthcare organizations, government, and other organizations. Study 2 explored factors associated with the number of like, retweets, and replies received by SAAM tweets. A sub-set of SAAM tweets (n=1328) from Study 1 was used for Study 2 and a negative binomial regression was used to examine tweet technical features, SAAM tweet content, and Twitter account characteristics as factors associated with the engagement outcomes. While different combinations of factors were found to be associated with likes, retweets, and replies, Twitter account characteristics including whether an account was verified, and the number of followers were significant predictors even when controlling for other factors across the three models, suggesting who tweets is one of the greatest drivers of engagement within SAAM tweets and the need for influential and high-profile entities to take part in participatory campaigns like SAAM. Study 3 was a qualitative study exploring the messaging needs and preferences of community college students ages 18-24 regarding sexual assault bystander interventions in situations involving alcohol use. Community college students experience similar sexual assault perpetration/victimization risk as students that attend four-year colleges/universities but are seldom engaged in efforts to prevent sexual assault. Campaign advertisements from two campaigns aimed at students that attend four-year colleges and universities were thus utilized as study materials and constructs from the Message Interpretation Process (MIP) model including realism, similarity, and expectancies were investigated. Study 3 engaged 22 females and three males via group or one-on-one interviews with embedded quantitative feedback. Results showed the importance of implementing campaign materials that potential audiences find realistic and similar to situations and scenarios they have encountered in real life. Components of ads where participants noted the most need for realism and similarity include the models/characters shown within ads (what they wore, how they posed, how they talked and acted), party/bystander scenarios (location, number of others present/likelihood of noticing an assault, the amount of conversation that took place prior to intervention, how alcohol was displayed). Study 3 also found that community college students may not be familiar with bystander intervention as a form of sexual assault prevention and that the settings where community college students consume alcohol can be both similar and different from students at four-year schools. These three studies offer insights into how future health communication interventions including health communication campaigns, and social media efforts can a) elevate the issue of sexual assault through greater and more strategic stakeholder engagement, and b) can more directly contribute to sexual assault prevention both in the general population, but especially among community college students. Results across the three studies also suggest the need to investigate and conceptualize messaging/campaigns where there are not clear delineations between those who create messages and those who receive them (e.g., audiences) differently than messaging/campaigns where messages are created by one central entity or group of entities and disseminated to a defined audience group.