SHARE focus group considers online orientation program

Princeton’s Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources and Education program hosted a session of focus groups on April 2 to get student feedback on a new online orientation program about sexual harassment and prevention for incoming students.

SHARE director Jacqueline Deitch-Stackhouse said the focus groups were part of a partnership between the SHARE office and the Equal Opportunity Programs office, run by director Cheri Lawson.

Much like the current AlcoholEdu program that all students must complete before arriving on campus freshman year, the SHARE program would educate students about sexual assault issues.

The focus group was held in order to get student feedback on whether the program would be effective and which out of three potential programs were the best.

“There are two major factors to consider,” Deitch-Stackhouse said. “Is the content something we want to put forward, [and] is it of value to our students? And the other major factor is, are students likely to engage with that online training to the extent that they can get something from it? So we have to sort of make a call that looks at all of this.”

To form the focus group, SHARE emailed student leaders on campus, including residential college advisers, athletic captains, eating club officers and USG members.

According to Deitch-Stackhouse, the student leaders were contacted as a follow-up to a lecture and training session with psychologist David Lisak last Sept. 27-28, when he met with key stakeholder groups on campus, including the seven student leaders in the SHARE focus group.

“Leaders tend to take a more active role and tend to be more responsive,” SHARE president Isabelle Laurenzi ’15 said with regard to why only student leaders were chosen to take part in the Lisak training session and subsequent focus group, adding that the leaders have a valuable perspective and opinion because they know the student body well. “It’s a good place to start; otherwise, you’re kind of randomly picking people.”

Brian Reilly ’14, an RCA in Rockefeller College who took part in the focus group, said the group was shown short segments of three different programs and discussed the effectiveness of the programs.

“There was one that I thought was stupid,” Reilly said. “I thought it completely missed the most important elements of sexual assault that happen here at Princeton, and it overdid a lot of stuff such that it wouldn’t be believable or taken seriously [by] or relatable to the majority of Princeton students.”

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He said the other two programs were good but different, so each of the group members gave feedback based on the style and content of the program he or she preferred.

After evaluating each of the programs, the group then answered questions about whether the programs were sensitive to students who may have had problems with sexual assault in the past, addressed issues specific to the University, were entertaining and whether they kept the viewer’s attention, among other questions, Reilly said.

The feedback will be reviewed by Deitch-Stackhouse and Lawson in the next few weeks, Deitch-Stackhouse said, and then the two directors will write a proposal to administrators in order to purchase and implement the program for the incoming class of 2017.

“Absolutely, we recognize that 'one-time-and-done' is not an effective means of addressing these very important issues,” Deitch-Stackhouse said. “The hope is that if you can sort of get exposed to some of that in our online training, then you’re seeing it live in person in a student-acted play and you’re debriefing about it in the first week of school, there’s going to be a lot of conversation about this issue in a proactive way.”