Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: Understanding Online-to-Offline Sexual Violence through Data Donation from Users

This project will improve our understanding of online-to-offline sexual violence by exploring how computer-mediated communication shapes consent exchange practices, or the ways in which individuals give and perceive to receive consent to sexual activity. Sexual violence is a serious public health problem in the United States: every 68 seconds an American is sexually assaulted. Online-to-offline sexual violence refers to nonconsensual sexual acts that occur via the combination of computer-mediated and face-to-face communication. The ways in which Americans discover and interact with potential sexual partners are increasingly computer-mediated, however we have little understanding of how computer-mediated communication influences perceptions of appropriate sexual behavior, which may predispose individuals to becoming perpetrators or victims of sexual harm without their realization. The knowledge produced through this project will benefit public health and constitute crucial advances in multiple intersecting fields such as human computer interaction, nursing, and psychology via informing entirely new solutions to online-to-offline sexual violence that are truly preventative and do not rely on conscious intent by the perpetrator to cause harm, or recognition by victims that harm is occurring. The research uses a mixed methods, longitudinal approach to studying online-to-offline sexual activity through online dating, a well known context for sexual violence. A framework of online-to-offline sexual violence through the lens of computer-mediated consent will be developed by creating, curating, and analyzing a dataset of user behavior examples during online dating. This will comprise instances of online daters' behavior across online and offline interaction as it relates to sexual activity such as consent practices, as well as the impacts of such behavior on key psychological constructs. Data collection will be made more scalable and privacy-preserving with a data donation app embodying best practices for sexual experience reporting. The research plan involves user-centered design, implementation, and evaluation of the data donation app, followed by multiple cohorts of longitudinal data collection with online daters through use of the data donation app and recurrent interviews about their online dating and associated sexual experiences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.