The first questionnaire is an online-questionnaire: It was the first time that an online-survey was used for a larger study on sexual victimization in Europe. In general the technique is broadly used for questioning students. Specific experience has been made in the pre-study on sexual violence against female students conducted at the Ruhr-University Bochum. The online-questionnaire used for this project was developed by the project´s researchers.
As further tools in order to gather data on sexual violence two types of interviews with different target groups have been implemented: The qualitative focus-group-interviews with female students explore more deeply risk-factors, possibilities for preventive and needs for help. The qualitative expert-interviews with practitioners of the university (equal opportunity commissioner, university administration, head of security), the police and local help services focus on cooperative prevention and intervention.
The online-questionnaire used in the national roll-out is based on the original questionnaire. In every partner-country additionally about 20.000 female students are asked for their experiences with sexual violence during their student life. The goal is to broaden the data basis for analyzing. In favour a representative sample of national universities is generated and the selected institutions are asked for participation. The survey is running during the winter term 2010 at all participating universities.
A second survey at all partner-universities is implemented in order to evaluate measure of prevention and intervention enhancing the security on female students on campus. For this purpose all female students at every partner-university are asked for their estimation of “best-practices” offered by help-services at the home university. This survey takes place during the spring term 2011.
All quantitative and qualitative data will be analyzed and compared by research frameworks and published after the end of the project.
