A mixed-gender date rape prevention intervention targeting freshmen college athletes.
This paper describes the evaluation of a mixed-gender workshop given to all freshman athletes from a large eastern university. A randomized post-test only experimental design was used to compare the date rape attitudes of freshman athletes who were exposed to a mixed-gender date rape workshop (n=56) with those of athletes who were not exposed (n=85). A previously validated instrument the 25 item Date Rape Attitudes Survey (DRAS) was used as the criterion measure. Three hypotheses were tested with the following results: (1) men athletes reported attitudes that were more tolerant of date rape than those reported by women athletes (i.e. the men were more likely to condone date rape) (2) freshmen athletes in the control group reported attitudes that were more tolerant of date rape than those reported by athletes in the treatment group. The third hypothesis which was tested but not supported was that men athletes did not exhibit a greater program effect than women athletes. Finally the authors discuss implications of the study and offer recommendations for future date rape prevention programs (authors)