Category: Culture, Society & Family

Practicing assertiveness skills on virtual-reality “dates” may help women prevent sexual victimization

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 3, 2010

It’s a stormy night when a young man offers a young college woman a ride home. First he makes friendly small-talk. But then he becomes sexually aggressive and angry.

Can she get out of this situation without getting hurt?

While this could be a real experience for many women, in this case it’s virtual reality. The purpose is role-playing in a psychology laboratory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Although realistic and scary, the role-playing is nevertheless a safe way to teach assertiveness skills to young women so they can resist sexual victimization, according to new research.

Read: “Can Virtual Reality Teach College Women Sexual Coercion and Rape-Resistance Skills“
Read: “Extreme reality: Women avoid sexual assault in virtual zone“

A pilot project in which women practiced assertiveness skills reduced sexual victimization considerably, say researchers Ernest Jouriles, Renee McDonald and Lorelei Simpson, psychologists in SMU’s Department of Psychology.

The researchers tracked participants in the assertiveness program over three months and found that women in a control group were sexually victimized at twice the rate of those who had practiced the skills.

New research in which women practice their newly learned skills on a virtual-reality “date” holds promise for making the program even stronger.

Jouriles, McDonald and Simpson will present the research in November at the annual conference of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

Between 25 percent and 50 percent of American women will experience sexual coercion or sexual assault during their lifetime, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Those in their teens and early 20s are at particularly high risk, research shows.

The toll on victims ranges from depression and anxiety to drug abuse, psychiatric symptoms and chronic medical conditions.

“Sexual assault prevention programs for young women are widely available,” says Jouriles, professor and chairman of the SMU Department of Psychology. “However, only a few have been scientifically evaluated. Although some of these programs have been shown to change young women’s knowledge and attitudes about sexual assault, they have not generally been shown to prevent actual assaults.”

Jouriles and McDonald designed the virtual reality program in collaboration with students and faculty at The Guildhall, SMU’s graduate-level video-game design program. They worked with Simpson to develop the assertiveness training program and are currently using the virtual-reality technology to enhance women’s practice experiences when they learn assertiveness skills.

To participate, a young woman wears a head-mounted display and earphones that allow her to navigate a make-believe sexually risky environment. It immerses her in a setting that feels genuinely threatening. She faces off against an avatar controlled by a live male actor, who delivers the dialogue and controls the speech and actions of the virtual date.

The department’s 10-foot-by-12-foot laboratory room is furnished with two adjoining bucket seats and a couch to replicate either the front seat of a car or a party setting.

Similar to a multi-player, interactive video game, the sophisticated head-mounted display streams computer-generated, 3D images. The perspective is first-person, which tracks and changes with the wearer’s head position. Earphones surround the wearer with the sounds of pounding rain and music from the car radio.

The woman experiences the make-believe environment from a seat next to the avatar. In a 10- to 12-minute role-play, the actor challenges the young woman’s assertiveness by gradually escalating the conversation from small-talk and flirtation to verbal sexual coercion and anger. The avatar’s lips move in sync with the actor’s speech, and his facial expressions and movements, such as changing the radio station and drinking beer, make the virtual interaction more natural.

Research by Jouriles and McDonald published in 2009 found that young women who practiced navigating the virtual reality environment had a stronger negative reaction to the sexual threat than did participants in conventional role-playing without virtual reality technology.

Although the study didn’t evaluate the reason for that difference, Jouriles and McDonald hypothesized that the virtual environment makes it easier for participants to become immersed in role-play. It’s possible that women in a conventional role-playing environment feel more self-conscious or that the situation is more artificial than women interacting with an avatar, which results in more guarded responses, they said.

McDonald is an associate professor. Simpson is an assistant professor.

Tags Dedman College, Ernest Jouriles, Lorelei Simpson, Lorelei Simpson Rowe, Renee McDonald, SMU Department of Psychology

Culture, Society & Family Researcher news

Texas historical marker based on SMU research of women’s jury service

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 27, 2010

Andrea Norris Kline vows she will never complain about a jury summons.

She learned about Texas women’s hard-fought battle for the right to serve on a jury as a student at Southern Methodist University as part of an independent research project for Crista DeLuzio, associate professor of history. Kline’s research was used to establish a Texas historical marker honoring the women who fought for the right to serve on a Dallas County jury.

Texas women earned the right to jury service in 1954, 34 years after receiving the right to vote.

“I have a newfound appreciation and sense of pride in participating in our local government,” says Kline, now an eighth grade American history teacher in Lancaster, Texas.

19th century: Jury service was top priority
Voting and jury service were top priorities of the women’s rights movement in the 19th century, says Crista DeLuzio, who teaches women’s history classes at SMU.

“Activists believed that with voting, they would inherit the right to perform other civic duties, including serving jury duty. This assumption proved to be incorrect.”

The 19th amendment gave women the right to vote, but left granting women’s right to jury service to each state.

Kline used U.S. census records, newspaper archives and Texas legislature records to document the history of jury service in Dallas County.

In Texas, as well as in much of the South, women campaigned for educational opportunities, rights for married women and access to public positions after the 19th amendment was ratified.

First Texas resolution was defeated
By the 1930s, however, the Dallas Business and Professional Women’s Club, The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Women Voter’s League made fighting for the right to jury service a priority. The first resolution brought before the Texas Legislature was defeated in 1949. In 1953 the Texas Senate passed a resolution to bring women’s right to jury service to vote as an amendment on the November ballot.

Kline’s study documents ongoing battles by Dallas County women to be added to the jury pool in a timely way. Women were not officially added to the Dallas County jury pool until August 1955.

“Most of us want to create our own place in history,” Kline says. “We make decisions that seem right for us and our community. Little do we know about our influence on future generations. These women made the decision to openly, actively and proudly take their place in Dallas history.”

Kline and DeLuzio worked with the Dallas County Historical Commission to draft a proposal for a historical marker to be place on the east side of the Old Red Courthouse, now a county historical museum in downtown Dallas. The marker was unveiled October 30.

On the day of the dedication, Kline’s students noticed she was dressed for a special occasion. After she explained the importance of jury service and her role in creating the maker, Kline’s eighth-graders gave her a standing ovation. &#8212 Nancy Lowell George

Related links:
Crista DeLuzio
SMU Department of History
Old Red Courthouse
The Handbook of Texas: Women and the law

Tags Andrea Norris Kline, Crista DeLuzio, Dedman College, SMU Department of History

Culture, Society & Family Fossils & Ruins Researcher news SMU In The News

“Archaeology” magazine looks at childhood archaeology research of SMU’s Eiselt

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 19, 2010

SMU archaeologist Sunday Eiselt leads the SMU-in-Taos Childhood Archaeology Project, a systematic and scientific examination of children’s lives through a community archaeological excavation project in the historic and picturesque plaza of Ranchos de Taos in northern New Mexico.

Journalist Julian Smith wrote about Eiselt’s research in the May/June edition of Archaeology magazine.

Sunday Eiselt

The research will provide new perspectives on the dynamics of Spanish and American occupation of New Mexico, says Eiselt, an SMU anthropology professor in SMU’s Dedman College. The plaza was once a hub of village life in Ranchos de Taos. But these days it’s notably absent of children. Their families have been driven to the outskirts of the Catholic village by a booming tourism industry that has pushed up property values.

Still, the children who lived there in decades past left their mark, says Eiselt, who for three years has led digging crews in some of the homes through her work in the SMU Archaeology Field School at the SMU-in-Taos campus. The crews have unearthed children’s artifacts up to 100 years old, including pieces of clay toys, tea sets, doll parts, clothing, mechanical trains, jacks, marbles, child-care implements, modern plastic Legos, Barbie doll parts, action figures and jewelry.

Eiselt’s pilot excavations in 2007 and 2008 revealed patterns that suggest children were integral to the workforce and household economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1930s, the evidence shows, they were drawn from the workforce into the home and pulled as a consumer into the expanding commercial market as well as into the public education realm, Eiselt says.

Her interest in childhood artifacts is unique because children are rarely documented in archaeological narratives — particularly in the Spanish borderlands, where they appear as victims of slavery and boarding schools.

Eiselt specializes in the historical archaeology of native people of the Southwest.

EXCERPT

Excavated toys and games reflect the changing experience of childhood in New Mexico

By Julian Smith
The full moon casts a warm glow across the dirt plaza of Ranchos de Taos and the adobe walls of the church of Saint Francis of Assisi, made famous by the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Inside the parish hall, archaeologist Sunday Eiselt of Southern Methodist University (SMU) faces a small crowd. She’s a little nervous. Eiselt is about to ask the residents of this conservative Hispanic community near Taos, New Mexico, for permission to dig up their backyards and the floors of their centuries-old homes. Today, the area is known as a ski town and a magnet for both the super-rich and hippie artists, but the community was founded in the 17th century, and is one of the oldest in the country.

Read the full online version. (A more complete story appears in the printed version.)

Tags B. Sunday Eiselt, Dedman College, SMU Archaeology Field School, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU-in-Taos

Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine Mind & Brain Student researchers

Children’s sense of threat from parental fighting determines trauma symptoms

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 24, 2010

If children feel threatened by even very low levels of violence between their parents, they may be at increased risk for developing trauma symptoms, new research suggests.

A study by psychologists at SMU found that children who witness violence between their mother and her intimate partner report fewer trauma symptoms if they don’t perceive the violence as threatening.

The research highlights the importance of assessing how threatened a child feels when his or her parents are violent toward one another, and how that sense of threat may be linked to symptoms of trauma.

Children’s perception of threat determines any trauma
“Our results indicated a relation between children’s perception of threat and their trauma symptoms in a community sample reporting relatively low levels of violence,” said Deborah Corbitt-Shindler, a doctoral candidate in the psychology department at SMU. “The results of the study suggest that even very low levels of violence, if interpreted as threatening by children, can influence the development of trauma symptoms in children.”

The researchers presented their findings February 24 at the “National Summit on Interpersonal Violence and Abuse Across the Lifespan: Forging a Shared Agenda” in Dallas. The scientific conference was sponsored by the National Partnership to End Interpersonal Violence Across the Lifespan.

Family violence experts estimate that more than half of children exposed to intimate partner violence experience trauma symptoms, such as bad dreams, nightmares and trying to forget about the fights.

SMU study surveyed Dallas area families
The SMU study of 532 children and their mothers looked at the link between intimate partner violence and trauma symptoms in children. The families were recruited from communities in the urban Dallas area. The National Institute of Mental Health funded the research.

In the study, mothers were asked to describe any violent arguments they’d had with their intimate partners, and they were asked about trauma symptoms they may have experienced because of the violence.

Similarly, the children in the study, age 7 to 10 years old, were asked to appraise how threatened they felt by the violence they witnessed, and about trauma symptoms they may have experienced because of the violence. The researchers defined “threat” as the extent to which children are concerned that: a family member might be harmed, the stability of the family is threatened, or a parent won’t be able to care for them.

Trauma: Nightmares, bad dreams, trying to forget
To assess trauma, children were asked questions such as if they’ve had bad dreams or nightmares about their mom’s and dad’s arguments or fights; if thoughts of the arguments or fights ever just pop into their mind; if they ever try to forget all about the arguments and fights; and if they ever wish they could turn off feelings that remind them of the arguments and fights.

The SMU researchers found that even when mothers reported an episode of intimate partner violence, their children reported fewer trauma symptoms when they didn’t view the episode as threatening. Although a mother’s emotions sometimes affect their children’s emotions, in this study the mothers’ trauma symptoms were unrelated to the children’s traumatic responses to the violence.

Corbitt-Shindler conducted the study in conjunction with her faculty advisers — Renee McDonald, associate professor, and Ernest Jouriles, professor and chair of the SMU Psychology Department. Additional co-authors of the study were SMU clinical psychology doctoral candidates Erica Rosentraub and Laura Minze; and Rachel Walker, SMU psychology department research assistant. — Margaret Allen

Tags Deborah Corbitt-Shindler, Dedman College, Erica Rosentraub, Ernest Jouriles, Laura Minze, Rachel Walker, Renee McDonald, SMU Department of Psychology

Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Researcher news SMU In The News

Boston Review: Africa Calling — Can mobile phones make a miracle?

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 15, 2010

Isaac%20Mbiti.jpg
SMU economist Isaac M. Mbiti has seen in his native Kenya how cell phone use in Africa is booming. He and Jenny C. Aker, Tufts University, wrote about the phenomenal growth of cell phones — and their impact — in the March/April 2010 issue of the Boston Review.

Cell phones can do only so much, say the researchers.

Many Africans still struggle in poverty and still lack reliable electricity, clean drinking water, education or access to roads.

“It’s really great for a farmer to find out the price of beans in the market,” says Mbiti, who has seen the impact of the cell-phone boom firsthand while conducting research in his native Kenya. “But if a farmer can’t get the beans to market because there is no road, the information doesn’t really help. Cell phones can’t replace things you need from development, like roads and running water.”

Mbiti and Aker will publish their findings in the article “Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Africa” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Global Development, an independent nonprofit policy research organization, has published a working version of the paper online.

EXCERPT:

Ten years ago the 170,000 residents of Zinder were barely connected to the 21st century. This mid-sized town in the eastern half of Niger had sporadic access to water and electricity, a handful of basic hotels, and very few landlines. The twelve-hour, 900 km drive to Niamey, the capital of Niger, was a communications blackout, with the exception of the few cabines telephoniques along the way.

Then, in 2003 a Celtel mobile-phone tower appeared in town, and life rapidly changed. “I can get information quickly and without moving,” a wholesaler in the local market told me. Before the tower was built, he had to travel several hours to the nearest markets via a communal taxi to buy millet or meet potential customers, and he never knew whether the person he wanted to see would be there. Now he uses his mobile phone to find the best price, communicate with buyers, and place orders.

Zinder, which has since grown to some 200,000 residents, still has no ATMs or supermarkets, and many roads to surrounding villages are made of sand or compressed dirt. But it is filled with small kiosks freshly painted in the colors of the prepaid mobile phone cards they sell.

Tags Dedman College, Isaac M. Mbiti, SMU Department of Economics

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