ACADEMIC OUTCOMES OF SEXUAL ASSAULT: THE ROLE OF POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS, SELF-COMPASSION, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL FLEXIBILITY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual assault continues to be a significant concern for post-secondary students in Ontario, Canada, as evidenced by the 18% increase in cases reported in 2021, the highest growth rate since 1996 (Statistics Canada, 2022). In addition to documenting the negative effects on mental health, recent studies have outlined the negative effects that sexual assault has on students’ academic performance as well. Although not all women who are affected by sexual assault report negative academic outcomes and posttraumatic stress health symptoms, several protective mechanisms including psychological flexibility and self-compassion have been proposed as moderating factors in the pathway linking sexual assault, posttraumatic stress symptoms, and academic outcomes. These factors were examined among women enrolled in postsecondary institutions in Canada. Specifically, the role of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) was investigated as a mediator between sexual assault and academic outcomes. As well, psychological flexibility, defined as “the ability to be in the present moment with full awareness and openness to our experience, and to take action guided by our values” (Harris, 2009, p.12) and self-compassion, known as “compassion turned inward and refers to how we relate to ourselves in instances of perceived failure, inadequacy, or personal suffering” (Neff, 2015) were explored as protective moderating factors against the development and/or maintenance of PTSS for survivors of sexual assault. Female-identifying post-secondary students in Ontario, Canada (N = 301) responded to an aggregated online survey, which assessed for experiences of sexual assault, academic outcomes, PTSS, psychological flexibility, and self-compassion. In addition, a semi-structured interview was designed to collect a richer source of data from a subset of participants (n = 12) to help better understand and explore students’ experiences. The results indicated that PTSS mediated the link between sexual assault and academic interference, which encompassed factors that may impede student progress or hinder academic success (e.g., delayed in a course). Some components of psychological flexibility, including present moment awareness and attentiveness, moderated the indirect effect of sexual assault on academic interference through PTSS, unlike other components, such as cognitive defusion, acceptance, committed action, as well as self-compassion. The small overall effect size suggests other factors may influence the relationship between sexual assault, PTSS, and academic interference. Findings from this study hold implications for professionals who will provide appropriate and empirically based academic advising and support to survivors of sexual assault, for those developing targeted intervention and prevention strategies, and could improve the consistency and continuity of care of the mental health needs of survivors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".