The development of procedures for measuring aspects of social/cognitive development of very sexually coercive male college students.

Abstract

While rape is a complex multidetermined phenomenon, I believe that the most fruitful avenue of research into its causes lies in the understanding of the cognitive abilities of sexually coercive males. Could it be that most sexually coercive men are capable of aggressive acts because these acts make sense to them from their particular level of social understanding? If a relationship between social/cognitive abilities and the commision of coercive sexual behavior can be identified we will have the information we need to design prevention and treatment programs. The goals of this research, therefore, were to develop procedures for measuring the social/cognitive developmental level of sexually coercive (or potentially aggressive) male college students and contrast very coercive and normally coercive males on these measures. A version of the Coercive Sexuality Scale was administered to several hundred undergraduate males at a large public University in the Northeast, in order to identify samples of sexually aggressive and nonaggressive males. Subjects were also administered the Acceptance of Interpersonal Violence Scale(AIV), which has been found to be a useful predictor of self-reported sexually coercive behavior. Based on scores from these measures two extreme groups (15 normal and 13 coercive subjects) were selected to receive a semi-structured interview measuring their levels of intra and interindividual understanding. The interview is based on one videotaped vignette depicting young adult female-male interaction. Computer-assisted qualitative analysis procedures were used to categorize the developmental variability among Subjects related to several important social reasoning constructs (e.g. self-knowledge, understanding relationships, perspective-taking and understanding of consequences). A standardized coding system for these abilities was developed which helped to discriminate between very aggressive & normally aggressive samples. Data was also subjected to quantitative analyses. The results of this study indicate that (1) the measures used to distinguish between coercive and control groups have some strength in terms of ability to measure social/cognitive development, and (2) on the whole the Coercive group responded at significantly more complex levels of social reasoning than did the Control group