Re: Hostile Hallways analysis

From: Eleanor R Linn (elinn@umich.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 10 1999 - 09:52:00 EST


Hi Christy,
The Hostile Hallways Re-analysis was published in the American
Educational Research Journal, Summer 1996, vol 33, number 2, pages 383-
417. The authors are Valerie Lee, Robert Croninter, Eleanor Linn, and
Xianglei Chen and its called The Culture of SExual Harassment in
Secondary Schools. If you present on the research findings to people who
are interested in research methodology, or who are examining the hows of
the Hostile Hallways study, I recommend you get this article and make
copies of the tables as overheads. IN my mind we did several things:
1) we situated the problem of sexual harassment in various theories
(biological, developmental, pathological, abuse of power,
organizational, societal power, cultural, Freudian, critical, ethical)
and showed than none was sufficient to explain what we know.
2) we tightened the definition of sexual harassment and cleaned the data
accordingly. A major criticism of the AAUW findings was that the
definition was overly broad - unwanted attention of a sexual nature that
happens at school and interferes with you life. We looked at everyone
who said they'd been sexually harassed. If when they described the worst
situation, they said they weren't upset, we took them out of the
harassed category. If they couldn't say where it happened at school
(even other place at school) and they couldn't say who did it (even
other person at school), we also took them out of the sexually harassed
category. We didn't say they weren't harassed, but we didn't feel
comfortable saying they were. This lowered the harassed rate of boys by
about 10% and of girls by a couple of points.
3) we built a seriousness scale, putting together what happened, how
frequently it happened, how upset the person said they felt, and what
repercussions they had from the most serious incident. Girls had a far
larger seriousness rating than boys.
4) we looked at interactions between the various factors. What we found
was that race/ethnicity, grades in school, ses, age, region of the
country had nothing to do with the likelihood of being harassed. Only 2
factors were strong, and they were very strong. Gender and having
friends who've been harassed.
5) the last thing was probably the most controversial. We looked at who
said they'd harassed others and who'd been harassed and we found a large
overlap. 51% of boys, and 51% of girls had been both harassers and
targets of harassment, but we didn't know which came first - and we
foolishly didn't think of including retribution as one of the reason why
people had harassed someone else. Still, we thought it important to
point out that 31% of girls have been harassed, but never harassed
anyone; that 9% of boys have harassed someone but never been harassed;
and 14% of girls and 31% of boys have not had any experience with sexual
harassment.
 
These are complicated numbers to keep in your head. The graphs and
tables in the article make it much clearer to see.

elinn@umich.edu



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