Projects

Ongoing Projects

Establishing Data-driven Processes to Promote Evidence-based Sexual Violence Prevention

ARC is partnering with the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault (ICASA) to evaluate Illinois’s sexual violence prevention efforts. Through this collaborative evaluation project, we’re examining efforts under the Rape Prevention & Education program (RPE), which is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. RPE efforts emphasize primary prevention (stopping sexual assault before it occurs) and community and societal-level approaches (e.g., a program that attempts to engage an entire school vs. a program that seeks to educate individuals). ARC has helped stakeholders guide the creation of the working state logic model, evaluation plan, and action plan, and throughout the course of this five-year grant, we intend to lead social network analyses among Illinois RPE stakeholders, conduct interviews with local preventionists in rape crisis centers and utilize state secondary data sources.

Completed Projects

Evaluability Assessment of the Implementation of Police Department Based Victim Assistance Programs

ARC is working with co-PI Dr. Jessica Shaw (UIC) and project consultant Dr. Theodore Cross (UIUC) to evaluate the implementation processes and outcomes associated with four victim assistance programs co-located within Illinois police departments. Our team seeks to address the following three overarching evaluation questions by employing a comprehensive evaluability assessment: (1) How is each program designed to operate?; (2) Are services being provided as intended?; and (3) What are the anticipated benefits of the program, and how can they most appropriately be measured? This project is funded by a one-year grant from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (ICJIA).

Sexual Misconduct and Perceived Campus Response Survey

The ARC team worked in collaboration with the Office for the Vice-Chancellor of Student Affairs to develop the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Sexual Misconduct and Perceived Campus Response survey. The aim of this climate survey was to understand students’ experiences of sexual misconduct and their perceptions of the campus response. The first iteration of the survey was produced in the Fall of 2015, and the most recent report was administered in the Spring of 2019. The 2015, 2017, and 2019 reports can be found at wecare.illinois.edu/reports.